Word: solzhenitsyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...going literary view, by contrast, is that Solzhenitsyn's fame depends on politics more than art, that he is a great man, but not a great writer. That is probably a shortsighted judgment. In America it will be necessary to wait for first-rate translations of his books, since each succeeding volume (Gulag will be no exception) stirs more than the usual storm about inaccuracies and betrayal of spirit that mars most translations. More important, one will have to see completed the already vast and elaborate mixture of fact and fiction through which he is attempting to restore...
...some, Stalin is still a hero. To most, Lenin is close to a political saint. Westerners -courtesy of cold war propaganda, a free press and honest scholarship-regard both men with varying degrees of repugnance. Even to them, much of the cruelty and stupidity will seem dreadful enough. Solzhenitsyn produces moments that are unbearable, breaking through all defenses that the mid-20th century reader is likely to have raised against being afflicted by the pain of others...
...result, Solzhenitsyn regards moral relativism as a virulent modern disease, though he distinguishes between actions natural to man-some of them violent -and unnatural cruelties. In The First Circle, after a discussion of what is right and what is wrong, a peasant-prisoner named Spiridon remarks: "Wolfhounds are right, cannibals are wrong...
...various implications of these views are familiar enough. Power corrupts and so do possessions. So do pride and pragmatism. "The political genius," Solzhenitsyn writes with savage irony, "lies in extracting success, even from the people's ruin." Similar notions, passionately held, drove Tolstoy to abandon family and property and preach nonresistance as well as noncooperation with any of the institutions of society...
...Solzhenitsyn resembles Tolstoy in a number of ways. Courage and the willingness to share danger with comrades, however, are among the highest virtues represented in his books-and life. Tolstoy believed that men cannot shape history. In August 1914, Solzhenitsyn steadily tries to refute this view. He believes, besides, that men are morally obliged to fight in defense of their country. Why did you do it? a girl asks a boy who has just volunteered for the army, in August 1914. Both have been influenced by the doctrine of nonresistance. "I pity Russia," he replies...