{"id":3132,"date":"2017-11-04T22:01:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T19:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aeneas.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=277"},"modified":"2017-11-04T22:01:42","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T19:01:42","slug":"solzhenitsyn-as-critic-of-communism-and-liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3132\/solzhenitsyn-as-critic-of-communism-and-liberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Solzhenitsyn as critic of Communism and Liberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Invisible Allies<\/i>, his tribute to those Russians who, at considerable risk to themselves, helped to further his work while he was under constant surveillance by the KGB, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told of the support that came his way with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/i>\u2014and how soon it was withdrawn. \u201cThroughout this time,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI simply did not realize that the support I received from \u2018progressive society\u2019 was but a passing phase based on a misunderstanding.\u201d Communist faithful who had become disillusioned with the Soviet regime<\/a> had assumed that, though anti-Stalinist, the former zek<\/i>\u2014gulag prisoner\u2014remained a socialist.<\/p>\n

Solzhenitsyn\u2019s reception in the West traced a similar trajectory. Universal approval of his courage in confronting the Soviet leaders soon gave place to outspoken disapproval of what Western bien pensants<\/i> considered to be his unenlightened view of the world. Disapproval turned to outrage when, on June 8, 1978, the Russian delivered a commencement address at Harvard University in which he indicted a West that showed unmistakable signs of decadence. The West\u2019s freedom, he declared that day, had degenerated into license, its media filled minds and souls with<\/p>\n

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gossip<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

and nonsense, its popular culture served only to coarsen and degrade, its people exhibited an unthinking sympathy for socialism and an inability to recognize evil. All of this, he concluded, was rooted in a view of the world that \u201cwas born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overnight, those who had lionized Solzhenitsyn cast him into the outer darkness and adopted in his place the nuclear physicist and Western-oriented dissident Andrei Sakharov. A good and courageous man, Sakharov was a secularist and self-proclaimed socialist who had mastered the language\u2014\u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201chuman rights\u201d\u2014of Western liberalism.<\/p>\n

Daniel Mahoney is well aware of this shift in allegiance, and in a book entitled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology<\/i> he opined apologetically that Solzhenitsyn sometimes weakened his case by overstating his claims; he insisted, however, that the Russian writer\u2019s combativeness was the result of his long struggle against the mighty \u201coak\u201d of Soviet power. Mahoney\u2019s purpose in both of his Solzhenitsyn books\u2014including this latest, The Other Solzhenitsyn<\/i>\u2014is to argue that the unrelenting attacks on the Harvard address and on the man himself were primarily the result of misunderstandings.<\/p>\n

Mahoney has little difficulty dismissing the charge, regularly leveled by Solzhenitsyn\u2019s 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 \u201ca burning love for one\u2019s motherland [is] compatible with humility before God and deference to a universal moral order.\u201d<\/p>\n

On such a view, a nation is like an icon\u2014it 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. \u201cFor what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit,\u201d he asked on that occasion, \u201cthan the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all-embracing humanitarianism?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Excerpts taken from\u00a0the American Conservative<\/a>\u00a0(click on the link to read the entire article)<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Invisible Allies, his tribute to those Russians who, at considerable risk to themselves, helped to further his work while he was under constant surveillance by the KGB, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told of the support that came his way with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich\u2014and how soon it was withdrawn. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6593,6,6609,6613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-politics","category-russia","category-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}