Because Novikof idolizes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and all of his ideas come from the novels and plays of his that he reads, I read Solzhenitsyn - the Moral Vision, which is both a biography and an overview of all of his works. I got inside Novikof's head and found his worldview, creating his ideological motivations.
Since Novikof founded his beliefs of anti-communism (and more Solzhenitsynian-ly: humanitarianism), he often quotes the author.
Vetrov also inexplicably has some of Solzhenitsyn's views (although he does not know it or him).
Here are the quotes I am considering for their lines: (if no -__, assume Sol.)
"Come on, paw me as hard as you like. There is nothing but my soul in my chest."
"As long as your in the barracks-praise the Lord and sit tight."
"The best efforts to reduce humanity to the level of the animal are never entirely successful; and, by definition, a process of dehumanization which is not totally successful is a failure: some humanity remains."
"It is a source of inner strength that so often characterizes Solzhenitsyn's little heroes, the small people who somehow are able to withstand everything that a soulless bureaucracy inflicts on them."
"...where ninety-nine men weep while one man laughs."
"the moment when it's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying...How should one live in order to not feel regret when one is dying?"
"'Oh, great science!' That's the same as saying, 'Oh, we great minds!' or even more precisely, 'Oh, great me!' People have worshipped fire, the moon, and wooden idols-but I'm afraid that worshipping an idol is not so painful as worshipping oneself."
"It is against such a soulless background that the characters are called upon to make themselves truly human beings. That many fail is no surprise. The wonder is that any succeed." - Ericson
"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"
"How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?" -Sol. "The warm man is the one open to perpetrating injustice. Solzhenitsyn devotes his life to making warm men feel the cold." - Ericson
"Solzhenitsyn was playing a clever, if dangerous, cat-and-mouse game with officialdom."
"Much has been written to prove that people on the whole are ungrateful and disloyal. But the opposite turns out to be the case, too" - Sol. "Human nature is a mixed thing; nobility and baseness coinhabit the human breast."
"[Marxism] deals 'with everything on earth except what one could see with one's own eyes.'"
"Epicureanism comes to sound like (Ericson) "the philosophy of a savage": "...the wisdom of the ancient philosopher seemed like the babbling of a child."
"The great library at Alexandria burned. In the monasteries they did not surrender but burned the chronicles. And the soot of the Lubyanka chimneys-soot from burned papers and more and more burned papers-fell upon the zeks led out to stroll in the boxlike area of the prison roof. Perhaps more great books have been burned than have been published."
"They were filled with the fearlessness of those who have lost everything, the fearlessness which is not easy to come by but which endures."
"From now on, he could write what he thought-let the censors be damned." - Ericson
"A fool loves to teach, but a clever man loves to learn."
"...his prison camp experience has helped him to see through the notion that one 'should cling to life at any cost'" - Erison and 'Sol'
"...what did they have to quarrel over? They all had the same enemy, death. What can divide human beings on earth once they are all faced with death?"
"He was no longer a vital cog in a large, important mechanism. In fact, he felt he had lost all power and significance." (Follow this will "he was an individual, capable of toppling the whole system."-Me)
"But living longer doesn't mean having more life. The real question is, what will I have time to achieve?...If they give me three years, I won't ask for more than that." "burn himself out in one great heroic deed for the benefit of the people and all mankind."
"By dying young, a man stays young forever in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time."
"They didn't puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they weren't going to die-they took death calmly...And they departed easily, as if they were just moving into a new house."
"He had once 'agreed to become a little man'; he will do so no longer." - Erison and 'Sol'
"Order in affairs maintains peace of mind."
"For the sake of truth, Solzhenitsyn has said that he would lay down his very life." - Ericson
"Quality of life is what counts, not quantity."
"The only emotions truly worthy of a man were civic duty, patriotism, a concern for all mankind."
"Russia was inexhaustibly strong, even if she was governed by a pack of fools."
"Brothers!...Isn't it selfish to save ourselves at the expense of others?"
"Those who do not are the villains; those who do are the heroes." - Ericson "They go about discreetly and they don't make a lot of fuss, but they get things done...It's senseless to try to fight the authorities; the way to deal with them is to steer them discreetly in the right direction."- Sol
"No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."
"that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in range of its ambitions, in its throughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism-no not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at the time blinded Western eyes to all else."
"If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth? And they will burst forth. It has to happen."
"Just as oxcart drivers of Gogol's time could not have imagined the speed of a jet plane, those who have never gone through the receiving-line meat grinder of Gulag cannot grasp the true possibilities of interrogation."
"Equally acid is his mock praise of the secret police: 'One has to give the Organs their due: in an age when public speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women's fashion all seem to come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most varied kind.'" - Erison and 'Sol'
"the Soviet system diabolically intended to dehumanize people, stripping them of any vestiges of human dignity, reducing them to the level of animals." - Ericson
"true martyrs, who 'died unknown, casting only in their immediate vicinity a light like a candle.'" - Erison and 'Sol'
"But this is where the wise differ from the unwise: they heed advice and counsels of caution long before the need becomes overwhelming."
"freedom is moral"
"Marxism is not only not accurate, is not only not a science, has not only failed to predict a single event in terms of figures, quantities, time-scales or locations...[but] it absolutely astounds one by the economic and mechanistic crudity of its attempts to explain that most subtle of creatures, the human being, and that even more complex synthesis of millions of people, society."
"The great crisis in the world today, as he sees it, is that the dehumanizing force of Communism is gaining rapidly. There is, it is true, 'a process of spiritual liberation in the U.S.S.R. and in the other Communist countries.' But this 'liberation of the human spirit,' explained most fully in From Under the Rubble,' can proceed only if the Western nations stand fast against the tide of Communism." - Erison and 'Sol'
"The primary, the eternal concept is humanity, and Communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says 'anti-Communism"is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: That which is against Communism is for humanity. Not to accept, but to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protect of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil."
"Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of 'good' and 'evil' as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter."
"And he tries to convince his American audience that the Soviets are not playing by those rules: '...your partners with whom you are conducting detent have a stone in their hands and its is so heavy that it could kill you with one single blow.'" - Erison and 'Sol'
"withstand the forces of anti-human totalitarianism in our world, he pleads for an accurate understanding of 'the nature of Communism,' preaches that 'only firmness makes it possible to withstand the assaults of Communist totalitarianism.'" - Erison and 'Sol'
"In this world split apart, the anti-human ideology of Communism is on the offensive, and the West, the bastion of the humanistic tradition, is in retreat."
What this means for Novikof's Character:
Novikof believes in the old Mother Russia, as Solzhenitsyn does. Even though Novikof did not personally experience the gulags, he has family who did and he knows the current atrocities (torture, brainwashing, extreme poverty) of the modern (1983) communist state. He has a deep admiration for America and (excluding the sinful nature of the media and culture), its values. He appreciates the joys and freedoms he does have (like his ability to read, not legally what he wants, but he is very educated) as he knows, from the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, that many born in the gulags or were brought there at a young age, never had the chance to learn to read. Novikof hides his illegal copy of the Complete Works of Solzhenitsyn in his room under a floorboard with a fake cover of a permissible book over it. He writes in this book constantly. This adds to his character as he is very anti-social, feeling like he knows way too much of the terrors of the world to sit through conversations and socialization with his passive, ignorant peers.
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