Pick up a Jane Austen novel, and you will discover that behind the long gowns and country dances, people in her era struggled with the same weaknesses we struggle with today. Well-written stories like Austen’s bring to life the human drama that is played out in every age, in every heart. I’ve been reading Jane [...]
The scholarship of Lee Congdon’s “Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West” is sound, demonstrating a breadth of knowledge and a depth of understanding of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West by Lee Congdon (164 pages, Northern Illinois University Press, 2017) This December will mark the centenary of [...]
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew in 1978 what we know now: Americans are by and large not altogether capable of acknowledging our moral, political, social, and religious shortcomings. He told his Harvard audience what they needed to hear, and what he spoke has echoed throughout the decades since. I. “The Farther A Society Drifts…” As the generations progress, [...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]
Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]
In the light or shadow of the current conflict in the Ukraine, it would seem appropriate to remind ourselves of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. This will enable a deeper understanding of the background to the conflict, especially if the following is read in conjunction with Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic understanding of the underlying reasons for [...]
Though Solzhenitsyn feared the consequences of an independent Ukraine, he respected the right of the Ukrainian people to secede, a right which they duly exercised as the former Soviet Union unraveled. Reiterating his subsidiarist principles he insisted once again that “only the local population can decide the fate of their locality, of their region.” Alexander [...]
Such are the power and relevance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's words, that we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not engage with his memories in an effort to connect them with our own, transforming them into something new. And, happily, this is what the authors of "Solzhenitsyn and American Culture" do. “Own only [...]
I was still puzzled by the mystery of why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had permitted me, an unknown writer, to visit him for an interview when he had spurned the advances of many better-known authors. The mystery was solved by his wife, Natalya, soon after she had welcomed me. In my previous essay, we concluded with my [...]
On the morning after my arrival in Moscow, I was picked up at the appointed hour by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s eldest son, who drove me to Solzhenitsyn’s home, secluded deep within a wood of towering pine trees. As I stepped out of the car, I felt that I was stepping into the greatest adventure of my [...]
Professor Edward E. Ericson, Jr. was an intellectual father to me. He shared the belief of the Russians that great literature can change lives, and that true literature which does not forget God or man or the particularities of life is ultimately more powerful than politics or even political philosophy. It might be mom or [...]
Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias, by Nalin Ranasinghe (192 pages, St. Augustine Press, 2009) Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Peter Augustine Lawler as he reflects on how Socrates models both rightly-ordered eros and logos, in contrast to the Stoics and Sophists. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher [...]
The new HBO series “Chernobyl” serves to warn us about the danger of persistent lies in a society that refuses to acknowledge truth. It would be a grave error not to take stock of our own tendencies toward deceit, as if our lies are radically different from those that underpinned the Soviet Union. Over several [...]