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print versionAlexander Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Resurrection 1
by Madhavan K. Palat
(National Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
Introduction
In the well-established tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn reflected on Russia’s past, her relation with the West, and the crisis of modern civilization; but he departed from that tradition in significant ways. He did not propose a Russian leadership of the planet as sometimes done by the Slavophiles, the civilization theorists Danilevskii and the Eurasianists, certainly the Bolsheviks, and eventually the Soviet Union in mid-career until the optimistic reign of Khrushchev. Nor did he suggest joining hands with the West to assert leadership over the world as in the uninterrupted tradition of the Russian state as a colonial great power in the nineteenth century, as a centre of world communism during the caesura of the interwar years, as a superpower in the latter half of the twentieth century, or even as a “democratic†state of the perestroika years and early post-Soviet phase when many fantasized that a “liberal†and truly “Western†Russia had returned like the prodigal son to her home in the liberal West after shedding her Soviet and Asiatic dross. Russia, like post-War Europe, would become more self-contained, more civilized, and more liberal. Solzhenitsyn adumbrated the post-Soviet, post-Cold War, and presumably postmodern retreat of Russia into her shell, a shell in which she shall in seclusion but not isolation cultivate her priceless cultural and moral pearls and contain the baleful impact of modern (not necessarily Western) culture.
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