Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a man out of time. A man whose values and outlook would have fit better into the middle ages than it does today.
Having spent years in a Bolshevick communist gulag in Siberia - he knew the longing for home that the homeless feel. He understood that Russia had been stolen from the Russian people - with promises of secular salvation. Most importantly - he understood with the wordless knowing of the aged - that family, folk, and homeland are part of the soul of mankind; an evolved adaptation to a hostile world - a God-given love of the particular and fear of the global that makes man always apart from God - and always in need of Him.
Russian president Vladimir Putin congratulates Solzhenitsyn.
Of course the Left and the neo-cons never understood him - to be more precise, they hated him. It would be too shallow to say they hated him for his last work:
Alexander Solschenitsyn, "200 Jahre zusammen." Die russisch-jüdische Geschichte 1795-1916 (200 Years Together. The Russian-Jewish History 1795-1916).The Left (self-proclaimed progressives) hated him for his grounding nature - the soil of Russia, the Russian Orthodox church, and his abnegation of the Leftist belief man is master of this world. A better understanding of Solzhenitsyn can be had by reading Ronald Berman's book,
Solzhenitsyn at Harvard. This book is occasionally a grudging acknowledgement that Solzhenitsyn is right about much of what he says - but always a disappointment that he said it.
At its worst
Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is essentially a bunch of neocons talking with each other about why they hate him. It is enjoyable to read Michael Novak, Richard Pipes, and Sidney Hook (all of whom would later lead us into the devastating fiasco of the Iraq war) deride him.
Take for example this from Richard Pipe's essay, "In the Russian Intellectual Tradition." in which he manages to slander not only Solzhenitsyn, but also the Russian people, and the Russian Orthodox church.
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In places, Solzhenitsyn uses virtually the same language as his nineteenth-century forerunners. This fact emphasizes the remarkable continuity of Russian intellectual history, especially its conservative strain, to which Solzhenitsyn indubitably belongs. Each generation of Russians seems to discover afresh the same answers, partly because of the hold on their imagination of Orthodox Christianity.."
If Solzhenitsyn had a modern incarnation it would be as one of the paleo-cons; deeply sceptical of the belief in progress that undergirds the institutions of modern America, and enslaves the American people to the worst angels of their nature - the belief that they know what is wrong with the world and can fix it.
RIP Alexander Solzhenitsyn
