Hoping to clear up misconceptions, scholar discusses Russian author Solzhenitsyn

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the most influential thinker of the 20th century, Daniel Mahoney, professor of political science at Assumption College, told a group of people in a crowded Woodburn Hall lecture room last night. \nIn his speech, titled “The Man Who Brought Down ‘An Empire of Lies’: The Case of Solzhenitsyn,” Mahoney described the Russian writer’s influence in exposing the world to the staggering scale of Soviet oppression – information unavailable in both the Soviet Union and internationally before the 1960s.\nThe publication of Solzhenitsyn’s most well-known book, 1973’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” was a “decisive moment in the erosion of the legitimacy power and cohesion of Soviet communism,” Mahoney said.\nMahoney is the co-editor of the 2006 volume “The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005,” nearly one-third of which consists of essays and memoirs never published in English.\nMahoney said the common understanding in the United States of Solzhenitsyn as an extreme conservative is mistaken and can be blamed in part on this lack of English material. Much of the criticism of his writing has instead been based on European reviews of French or German translations, leaving the English-speakers without the option of judging for themselves. \n“The core of Solzhenitsyn’s thought has been misrepresented in many ways, portraying him as authoritarian, an ultranationalist and (an) anti-Semite, and so on,” he said.\nThese “received opinions” are inaccurate, said Mahoney, who hopes the new collection will rehabilitate Solzhenitsyn’s image. \nMahoney said the writer went through his own intellectual evolution – from dedicated young communist in the 1930s, to dissident political prisoner in the 1950s, to exiled hero in the 1970s.\nMahoney said Solzhenitsyn has expressed gratitude for his experience in a prison camp where he saw for the first time the “empire of lies,” as he described the Soviet Union. If not for his arrest, he would have become just another Soviet writer and an apologist for the system, Mahoney quoted Solzhenitsyn as saying. \nConfirming Mahoney’s assertion that Solzhenitsyn is not widely read in the West by anyone under age 40, many of the students in the aºudience, both undergraduate and graduate, admitted they have not read any of his works. But nearly all lined up for free, autographed copies of “The Solzhenitsyn Reader.”\n“I haven’t read Solzhenitsyn,” graduate student Bogdan Popa said, as he watched for a break in the line. “But it was interesting how he (Mahoney) is trying to change the view of him in the West, and even among this audience.”