Russia’s ignorant still hate Solzhenitsyn

In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.

Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end up crucified on crosses of their own weakness, or of the state’s disapproval. This was certainly true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not only did he, in the pungent Russian phrase, experience the horrors of the Russian century ‘on his own hide’, but he was possessed with an overwhelming moral imperative to record what he saw and felt.