It feels instinctive to say that the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn marks an end of an era. Which era, though?
Solzhenitsyn’s life spanned many eras: WWII, the gulag, the Khrushchev years, stagnation, the last gasps of the Cold War, and, most recently, the strange and wondrous and bewildering reality of post-Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is crystal clear if one is looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. His legacy among his people and the people who love and study Russian literature and culture, however, is a much more complicated phenomenon.
In the West, Solzhenitsyn is most readily regarded as a symbol of All That Stalin Did Wrong. In today’s Russia and other post-Soviet countries he is a public figure whose function was and is debated, whose artistic achievements are criticized with gruffness rarely found elsewhere, and whose insistence on criticizing liberal democracy has earned him respect for the searing honesty with which he presented his views.
Living in the U.S., I have repeatedly run up against the sentiment that today Solzhenitsyn is intellectual Russia’s beloved grandmaster, a kindly, fatherly figure. The truth is, most people I know responded more emotionally when the likes of Nonna Mordyukova and Mikhail Pugovkin passed on earlier this summer - old school Soviet actors whose movies also serve as reminders of a time and a place gone forever.
The deaths of Mordyukova and Pugovkin did not, for the most part, make international headlines. But these figures were no less important in a cultural and historical context. Read More
