Reviewing two recently published translations of works by the great Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Gary Saul Morson addresses the accusation, leveled by some of Solzhenitsyn’s former admirers, that late in life he became an anti-Semite and a nationalist in what now would be called a Putinist mode. Morson rejects these “absurd and contradictory charges,” and considers the Nobel Prize-winning author’s own responses:
On the one hand, a Russian émigré journal accused [Solzehnitsyn] of “selling out to the Jews,” and a Russian publisher based in London insinuated he was really the Jew “Solzhenitsker.” On the other, the Jewish magazine Midstream called [the 1971 novel] August 1914 a new Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Despite his exposure of Soviet forced labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago, he was pronounced “an ally of the Kremlin,” perhaps even a secret agent. Solzhenitsyn recalled that the émigré Lev Kopelev called him “the leader of a ruthless party” devoted to “extreme Russian nationalism . . . more terrifying than Bolshevism.”
Few Westerners regarded Solzhenitsyn as a Bolshevik agent, but many believed that his nationalism entailed imperialist and anti-Semitic views. After all, Solzhenitsyn considered himself a patriot. . . . Unlike others who wanted to see Bolshevism end, he rejected revolutionary violence and insisted on gradual change. And what sort of nationalist or imperialist insists that his country should give up its empire?
In Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1991), for instance, he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to grant the non-Slavic Soviet republics their independence. Indeed, if they didn’t want it, he insisted, Russia should secede from them. While Russia should try to persuade other Slavic republics to remain with Russia, he argued, they, too, should be allowed to leave without hindrance. Foreseeing the conflicts likely to arise eventually if Ukraine, with its large Russian-speaking population and its close cultural ties to Russia, chose to secede, Solzhenitsyn, who considered himself both Russian and Ukrainian, hoped to preclude the devastating conflict we see today.
The charge of anti-Semitism particularly offended Solzhenitsyn, who, as some critics conceded, defended Jewish dissidents and the right of Jews to emigrate in order to avoid religious and other persecution in the USSR.
Read more on New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/05/12/what-solzhenitsyn-understood-march-1917-between-two-millstones/