Word: solzhenitsyn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Genovese's broadside, to some European intellectuals, is merely one new entry in an old and familiar debate that has been particularly vibrant in France. The 1973 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was a critical event for the French left. His searing expose of the vast Soviet prison-camp system, which sold 600,000 copies in France in less than a year, inspired a cadre of ex-radicals eventually known as "The New Philosophers" to issue its own critiques of communism. In Barbarism with a Human Face, for example, Bernard-Henri Levy demanded that French radicals confront...
...Solzhenitsyn has been a voice quite literally crying in the wilderness. His call for Russians to set their sights on higher things has been welcomed by enthusiastic crowds in the hinterlands, but he faces a much tougher audience in Moscow. Few urban sophisticates have time anymore for the kitchen conversations about the Russian soul that were a staple of intellectual life when Solzhenitsyn first lived in the country. A savage commentary in the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta proposed what to do with this troubling revivalist preacher: "Give him mothballs! And more mothballs! And put him to rest...
...afraid to get his hands dirty or his feet wet in his quest to discover modern Russia. One day he braved floodwaters to visit the small farming community of Bichyovka, plagued by heavy rains. An old babushka, who obviously did not know the identity of the visitor, shrilly confronted Solzhenitsyn with a timeless, rural Russian lament: "The roads are full of water. Why can't you do something about it?" Said Solzhenitsyn: "I'm not an official. I can't do anything." It was a humble admission from a literary giant, proving the biblical dictum that prophets have no honor...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embarked on a slow train journey across Russia with his family, one of the few journalists with whom he spoke was TIME senior correspondent David Aikman, who had interviewed the Russian writer in Vermont in 1989. During their conversations, Aikman made the following notes on Solzhenitsyn's thoughts about his return home...
...Moscow ready for Solzhenitsyn's message of moral renewal...