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Sunday, 7th September 2008

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Death of a dream as nationalists claim dissident as their own



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It is a sad testament to Russia that it is Solzhenitsyn the anti-modernist crank who is being remembered, not the foe of Soviet barbarism, says NINA KHRUSHCHEVA

PROPHETS, it is said, are supposed to be without honour in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn – the dissident and once-exiled author of the Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Iv...



The full article contains 1014 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
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  • Last Updated: 06 August 2008 8:12 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
 
1

Hugh V McLachlan,

Elderslie 07/08/2008 11:24:42
What a fine, perceptive article. It was a pleasure to read it.

'The tragedy of Solzhenitsyn is that, although he played a mighty role in liberating Russia from totalitarianism, he had nothing to say to ordinary Russians after their liberation, except to chastise them.'

This hits the spot. He was not a liberal.
2

Neil,

Glasgow 07/08/2008 12:16:44
Of course he wasn't a liberal. It is not only "Both Putin and Khrushchev sought to use Solzhenitsyn for their own purposes" it was also the west. Like Shakespeare & the Bible, everybody wants to take the bits they like & forget the bits they don't.
3

Hugh V McLachlan,

Elderslie 07/08/2008 13:54:30
#2 Neil

What bits of Shakespeare do you not like?
4

McGinty,

07/08/2008 17:25:13
It will be interesting to see what happens though. In Russia perhaps over half have never read Solzhenitsyn's classic titles, but apparently they are now being republished in Russian. The Gulag Archipelago mocks Stalin, whom many still deify, criticises the corruption, the self-aggrandisement, the abuse of power and the courts under the Soviets. Perhaps the Russians see these problems as existing only in the past, but on the other hand, if his writing can awaken conscience then Putin's support of this man will hopefully come back to bite him. I'm not surprised Solzhenitsyn became disillusioned at the decadence of the West, especially as an educated man living in America in the eighties and early nineties. Perhaps he foresaw the advent of our neo-conservative friends, and it's many more than him that find this so draining and unpalatable. It is sad that he never recovered his moral and protest voice with the accompanying hope which so characterised his earlier work.
5

A S Fraser,

07/08/2008 18:37:32
#4 Perhaps it was not so much the neo-conservatives he foresaw as the abandonment of the objective moral law. In his speech to the AFLCIO in 1975 he alluded to those in the West who regarded the concepts of good and evil as a joke, and he made reference to the law now being considered above morality. Perhaps he foresaw that the concepts of good and evil would be perverted in modern law - so that what was once evil would be regarded as good and that the defenders of what was once good would be regarded as evil. One thinks in particular of the laws regarding abortion and sodomy where abortion and sodomy are now considered as rights and where those who oppose same are illiberal and, in some minds, criminal. Perhaps he saw that the normal would be sacrificed to the abnormal. After all he acknowledged that Communism 'rejects all absolute concepts of morality' and 'scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil"' He remarked, 'Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil... But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will sink to the status of animals.' Perhaps Solzhenitsyn saw that if the decadence of the West was imported to Russia it too would be reinfected with that Communist and now universal belief in the relativity of good and evil.
6

Hugh V McLachlan,

Elderslie 07/08/2008 21:50:35
#5 A S Fraser,

'Perhaps Solzhenitsyn saw that if the decadence of the West was imported to Russia it too would be reinfected with that Communist and now universal belief in the relativity of good and evil.'


This is a needless fear. There is not a universal belif in the relativity of good and evil. There are changes in what the fashionable views are with regard to moral relativity but, at all times and places, there is no shortage of people who reject moral relativism. Furthermore, there is a difference between being an immoral person and professing to believe the false philosophical theory of moral relativism. Many professed moral relativists are actually good people who behave as well as those who reject moral relativism and those who have no particular views on the matter. People do not act consistently in accord with their philosophical theories.

 

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