As for Solzhenitsyn — he is certainly not out of favor in University Slavic Departments, which is where he belongs. If he is not widely taught in English Departments at the University level (I wouldn’t know), it is because the English faculty understand that they are not qualified to teach him. Sorry, but if you haven’t read him in Russian you haven’t read him at all. A professor who HAS read him in Russian, however, and who knows a little something about the cultural, political, and literary context in which he’s writing (that PhD in Russian literature does actually stand for something, after all — they don’t hand them out for free and everyplace I know of you have to pass a rigorous comprehensive examination in Russian literature and culture in order to be allowed even to begin the doctoral dissertation), can make up the shortfall by explaining what is “lost in translation.”

He is taught in every Slavic Department and in every University where they have at least one faculty member specializing in Russian literature. He is generally acknowledged to be the most important Russian writer of the 20th century. So I would have to say this “obituary” is decidedly premature.

I have a law degree. I’m not stupid. I also have a BA in English. I spent some time trying to nail down terms like “deconstructionism,” but found it a waste of time, since all they led to was this found at http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/decon-body.html :

“[D]econstructionism is a challenge to the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. Basing itself in language analysis, it seeks to ‘deconstruct’ the ideological biases (gender, racial, economic, political, cultural) and traditional assumptions that infect all histories, as well as philosophical and religious “truths.” Deconstructionism is based on the premise that much of human history, in trying to understand, and then define, reality has led to various forms of domination – of nature, of people of color, of the poor, of homosexuals, etc. Like postmodernism, deconstructionism finds concrete experience more valid than abstract ideas and, therefore, refutes any attempts to produce a history, or a truth. In other words, the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all.”

Having thus disposed of all meaning, they can proceed to make political correctness the only measure of speech or ideas. Truth is meaningless. Fact is meaningless. Anything you don’t want to accept can be deconstructed away, but there is one thing left: power over another’s grades, tenure, votes in the Humanities Department, the power of an editor, or an office holder.

Why not? Since when is antisemitism uncondemnable?

The beauty of this post is that uburoisc’s own words represent perfectly the type of language he proceeds to decry. I love people like this, unintentional comedy is the sort that never gets old. This reminds me of the scene from The Office in which Michael asks how it is possible that one of the other office-workers can be so self-unaware.

Trouble is for Jews and western modernists types, there is a grain of truth that those groups tended to support the Socialists and SR’s, or Reds, heavily. But to put the horse in front of the cart, one of the reason that Jews gravitated towards the Reds is that most of the Whites was murderously hostile to them, especially the ugly fascist Ukranian nationalists.