Reply To: The Random Post Thread (Game Potential)
I’m back! Time to catch up on backlog:
On another subject, I’ll once again take advantage of (noted Russophile) mtgordon’s absence to confess that up until I ran across Solzhenitsyn’s obituary, I hadn’t realized the man had still been alive. That makes me feel particularly guilty, even if I never cared much for what little I’d read of his work.
First, I don’t really think of myself as that much of a russophile. My wife, who is russophone, is even less of a russophile. She’s even starting to have second thoughts about Isaac learning Russian. Honestly, I’d rather teach him Yiddish and Hebrew.
Cathy Young had this to say about Solzhenitsyn’s passing, and this article by Richard Pipes is very much in agreement. In short, while Solzhenitsyn was a critic of Marxism, he truly was more of a reactionary, a Slavophile rather than a pro-Western advocate of democracy, which he saw as alien to Russia, just as Marxism was alien to Russia. Once Russia was solidly under the command of a strongman who tolerated the Russian Orthodox Church and wrapped himself in the traditional flag, he became a supporter of the government. In that regard, he disappointed many people. I have long had more respect for Garry Kasparov as an opposition political figure. Even if he’s toothless, at least he’s not spineless. As for Soviet-era samizdat authors, Mikhail Bulgakov and Venedict Erofeev are more widely read and quoted among Russian speakers I’ve known. Some of this is because they’re more readable; satire is a relatively palatable form of social criticism.
Summary: Bry, don’t feel guilty. Solzhenitsyn spent the last decade or so making himself forgettable.
We now return you to a more typical policy of nil nisi bonum.