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[BRIEF NOTE] On Solzhenitsyn
Aug. 5th, 2008 04:29 pmAleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, as multiple people on my friends list have noted.
A question to you all: Am I entirely misguided to think that although One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in particular was a powerful denunciation of the gulag system and the whole Soviet structure of power, that after his escape to the West he became a hypocrite who denounced the Western materialism that saved him via the West's avaricious publishing industry, a mistake compounded by his decision on his return to Russia to promote the sort of reactionary Great Russian nationalism* that thankfully never took off in his lifetime?
* I'm quite aware that other forms of nationalism elsewhere are equally noxious, incidentally.
A question to you all: Am I entirely misguided to think that although One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in particular was a powerful denunciation of the gulag system and the whole Soviet structure of power, that after his escape to the West he became a hypocrite who denounced the Western materialism that saved him via the West's avaricious publishing industry, a mistake compounded by his decision on his return to Russia to promote the sort of reactionary Great Russian nationalism* that thankfully never took off in his lifetime?
* I'm quite aware that other forms of nationalism elsewhere are equally noxious, incidentally.
