The sophomore using the widely popular Norton Anthology of World Literature would find in the introductory remarks to Solzhenitsyn’s short story “Matryona’s Home,” about a peasant woman displaying Christian charity in her cruel collectivized village, these sentences: “Since Solzhenitsyn is such a dedicated anti-communist and anti-Marxist, many Westerners have jumped to the conclusion that he is in favor of the Western democratic system. Such is not the case. He looks back to an earlier, more nationalist and spiritual authoritarianism represented for him by the image of Holy Russia.”
Is that false, and is his anti-Semitism, popular in his fairy tale old Russia, false too? Give the man his due, he was a great writer and very brave and influential, but his ideals of Russian Orthodox Pan Slavism is what my grandparents fled Russia for.
