Daniel Mahoney is well aware of this shift in allegiance, and in a book entitled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology he opined apologetically that Solzhenitsyn sometimes weakened his case by overstating his claims; he insisted, however, that the Russian writer’s combativeness was the result of his long struggle against the mighty “oak” of Soviet power. Mahoney’s purpose in both of his Solzhenitsyn books—including this latest, The Other Solzhenitsyn—is to argue that the unrelenting attacks on the Harvard address and on the man himself were primarily the result of misunderstandings.
Mahoney has little difficulty dismissing the charge, regularly leveled by Solzhenitsyn’s cultured despisers, that he was a Russian nationalist and imperialist. In fact the great writer was a patriot who loved his country and expected others to love theirs; he explicitly repudiated nationalism and imperialism. More important, Mahoney recognizes that “a burning love for one’s motherland [is] compatible with humility before God and deference to a universal moral order.”
On such a view, a nation is like an icon—it is not itself the universal but rather a window through which the universal may be glimpsed. Dostoevsky made a similar point in the famous address on Aleksandr Pushkin that he delivered in June 1880. “For what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit,” he asked on that occasion, “than the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all-embracing humanitarianism?”
Excerpts taken from the American Conservative (click on the link to read the entire article)
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