The widespread perception of Solzhenitsyn as a figure inseparable from the vanished world of the Cold War has become an obstacle to appreciation of his works. To some extent, an earlier generation of his Western admirers contributed to this misunderstanding: e.g., many Cold War conservatives were dead set against any discussion of race, which would make it impossible to apply any of Solzhenitsyn’s insights to our struggle against today’s racially-obsessed Left. (more…)
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This is an audio recording of Spencer J. Quinn’s six-part review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work Two Hundred Years Together, a history of the Jews broadly in Russia and specifically as part of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union. We would like to thank Gaddius Maximus for this reading. (more…)
Much of the tremendous value of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together rests in how it was written completely without rancor. Only a highly cynical or unreasonable person could call it anti-Semitic — that is, a work that professes animosity or anger towards Jews as a people. (more…)
Large numbers of Jews who did not leave after the revolution failed to foresee the bloodthirstiness of the new government, though the persecution, even of socialists, was well underway. The Soviet government was as unjust and cruel then as it was to be in 1937 and 1950. But in the Twenties the bloodlust did not raise alarm or resistance in the wider Jewish population since its force was aimed not at Jewry.(more…)
By the time the reader begins the second volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, he’s aware of a complex yet fragile balance established by the author in volume one. Jews and Russians have shared the same empire and language for centuries, but not without conflict brought about by their different natures and the exigencies of history. (more…)
Despite including little by way of terrorism or atrocity, chapter ten is one of the most revealing and fascinating chapters in all of Two Hundred Years Together. (more…)
The memoirs of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are unique in his vast body of work given that they serve more as metadata than data regarding the man’s impact upon the culture and perspective of the political Right. I’m sure this could be the case with the memoirs of any important person. However, with Solzhenitsyn, so often his work was his life. He drew directly from his experiences as a zek to develop his early works, such as his prison plays, his unproduced screenplay The Tanks Know the Truth (about a gulag uprising), (more…)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn et al. From Under the Rubble Boston: Little, Brown & Company (1975)
Shortly before being deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn contributed three essays to a volume that was later published in the West as From Under the Rubble. (more…)
Benjamin Ginsburg How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013
Benjamin Ginsburg has his uses for the Dissident Right. As a Jewish author who sometimes airs dirty Jewish laundry for his readers, he can be placed in the same category as David Cole — Jews who offer critical assessments of their own people that justify the claims of anti-Semites, (more…)
The white man stood tall and proud. He was handsome and confident, and was well-dressed in his white summer-weight frock coat. Regal, although not quite the Tsar. As Prime Minister, he was the next best thing. Despite this, Pyotr Stolypin had remarkable little security around him when he attended a play at the Kyiv Opera House on September 14th, 1911. His relationship with the Tsar had soured a bit recently due to his insistence that the local governments of the western provinces (called zemstvos) be dominated by the Russian people and not the influential Polish landowners. (more…)
Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (more…)
A recurring theme in Book 1 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917 — or Node III of his vast Red Wheel opus — is “this could have been prevented.” Of course, this refers to the first successful socialist revolution in Russia, which took place in March 1917 (or in February, according to the Julian Calendar). In March 1917, Solzhenitsyn offers a wealth of perspective on the fateful events in Petrograd which led to the abdication of the Tsar and the monarchy’s ultimate replacement with the Provisional Government. (more…)
In 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn excised the several Lenin chapters from his massive and unfinished Red Wheel epic and compiled them into one volume entitled Lenin in Zürich. At the time, only one of these chapters had been published — in Knot I of the Red Wheel, known as August 1914 — while the remaining chapters would still have to languish in the author’s desk drawer for decades before appearing as part of The Red Wheel proper (November 1916 and March 1917, specifically). (more…)
And all of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs.
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, BBC speech, March 24, 1976
In the summer of 1975, the recently-exiled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered three speeches in the United States: two to labor organizations and one to Congress. The following year, he was interviewed by the BBC and then delivered a speech over British radio. (more…)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn seemed to write novels like a historian. It’s as if he didn’t always know which details were more important than others, and so erred on the side of quantity rather than quality. Not that his novels don’t contain great stuff – rather, they tend to lead the reader through long and uneven passages in between the moments of greatness. (more…)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s address at Harvard in June 1978 (video here), which was initially entitled “The Exhausted West” before being renamed “A World Split Apart” when it was published in book form, caused quite a stir among the Americans. (more…)
It’s striking how cherry-picking can hone the pen of a propagandist and disguise malice behind a veneer of reason. Jewish writer Cathy Young provides excellent examples of this all throughout her December 2018 Quillette article, “Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet.” Published shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s 100th birthday, the article’s point, essentially, is to tarnish the reputation of a great man in order to steer discourse away from aspects of his work which the current zeitgeist finds problematic. (more…)
Like most of your articles, I thought your “Letter to the Antisemites” from March 11 was perfectly reasonable and well-put, yet I believe it missed a few crucial points. (more…)
The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s New Right lecture of February 4, 2012. I want to thank Michèle Renouf for making the recording available. (more…)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deux siècles ensemble
Volume 1: Juifs et Russes avant la révolution
Paris: Fayard, 2002
It appears now that the English-speaking world will have to wait some time yet for a translation of Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two volume study of Russian-Jewish relations. Translations into both French and German have been available for five years, and Italian, Hungarian, Greek, Czech, and Latvian editions are in the works. (more…)
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