So farewell, then
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Or is it
Alexandr? I can't
Say Alexandr, though. Anyway
What was your
Catch phrase?

© E. J. Throbb, aged 17¾

He didn't really have one.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was about fifteen. Shortly afterwards, I read Primo Levi's account of life in Auschwitz,  If This Is A Man. Morally they are equivalent; indeed Solzhenitsyn's was braver, given the circumstances under which he wrote it. It is very good that he wrote it. But Levi's book is much better written. As Andrew O'Hagan puts it in today's Telegraph:

Being outraged, and being right, and being a brave witness, are not the same things as being a good writer, and Solzhenitsyn's writing fails to outlive its subject.

As Rebecca says, he was no Tolstoy, but he seems, in his denunciation of the West, to have some of Tolstoy's preachiness. Andrew Cusack:

Giving the 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a sharp and stunning rebuke to the modern West, repudiating its liberalism, materialism, and supremacism.

“There is this belief,” Solzhenitsyn said, “that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”

I disagree. Non-Western countries should indeed be measured with a Western yardstick, and, in the main, they should be found wanting. The mistake we should not make, particularly in dealing with the Islamic world, is to imagine that they think as we do. Perhaps this is what Solzhenitsyn means - it is at best unclear.

Someone who has taken refuge in the West, and found recognition and comfort there, is as entitled to denounce it as anyone else. He is, literally,  free to do so. Someone fleeing the West for the Islamic or Communist world would probably not be so free - I say "probably" because such a flight has yet to take place. However justified some of his criticisms, Solzhenitsyn was biting the hand that fed him. "A plague on both your houses," rings a little hollow when one of the houses was a Gulag.