This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s passing resulted in a torrent of comment, most of it complimentary, from journalists and bloggers. Even Christopher Hitchens’ tribute was uncharacteristically devoid of his usual irreverent contrariness.

Simply Jews posted a tribute: This is not a time for criticism of any kind - of his work, of his personal traits, of his philosophy. It is time to grieve.

Bob from Brockley seemed mildly upset that some bloggers self-servingly remembered the man’s antisemitism.

It’s as though people were walking on padded tip toes in trying to revere the memory of a person whom the world had come to adulate as an iconic freedom fighter and crusader for justice.

I have to wonder, though. Most critics affirm that he was not exactly the literary titan perceived by the world, a perception mostly fuelled by admiration for his courage in taking on the Soviet dystopia. Why the reluctance to recall, upon the event of Solzhenitsyn’s passing away, the less salutary aspects of the dark sentimentality of his “Russian soul”, such as the reactionary longing for a peasant pastoral past that never was, or the inevitable antisemitic bent intrinsic to his understanding of history?

“Critics have long pointed to passages in The Gulag Archipelago that selectively list the Jewish last names of labor camp commandants. And Solzhenitsyn’s historical novel August 1914, published in English in 1972, emphasizes the Jewishness of Dmitry Bogrov, assassin of Russia’s reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin.

Solzhenitsyn has claimed that he was merely telling it like it was, but August 1914 embellishes history considerably: While Bogrov was a thoroughly assimilated revolutionary from a family of third-generation converts, Solzhenitsyn saddles him with a Jewish first name, Mordko (a diminutive of Mordecai), and the fictitious motive of trying to undermine the Russian state to help the Jews.

Then came the news that Solzhenitsyn was writing a major history of the Jews in Russia. The first volume of Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), covering the period from 1795 to 1916, appeared in 2001; the second volume followed in 2003. According to Solzhenitsyn, the work was intended to give an objective and balanced account of Russian-Jewish relations: “I appeal to both sides — the Russians and the Jews — for patient mutual understanding and admission of their own share of sin.” This comment seems suspicious in itself, given that, for most of their history in Russia, Jews were victims of systematic oppression and violence. To talk about mutual guilt is a bit like asking blacks to accept their share of blame for Jim Crow. ”

Frankly, if the author was antisemitic, then he would be joining some of the most distinguished writers in the western canon , like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway…

I held off on the subject because I wanted to hear what another famous dissident (seruvnik) had to say about him. And here it is:

“Fellow former dissident Natan Sharansky said on Monday that such accusations ought not overshadow the fact that Solzhenitsyn had ‘changed the lives of millions of people… What’s important is that Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent time in prison like millions of others,’ said [former refusenik and now leading Israeli public figure Natan] Sharansky. ‘He made it “impossible” for people in the free world to be fooled into believing that the Soviet system worked.’”

Yes. Impossible to disagree with this momentous achievement. At the same time, I have to probe how it is that, in his passionate quest for justice for the victims of Stalinism, a cold corner was especially reserved for Jews? How come his pity embraced and forgave, unconditionally, the Russian people, from whose misery and despair sprang the Bolshevik revolution and its attendant horrors, but excluded the Russian Jews who suffered just as much under Tsarist, and then, Stalin’s terror regimes?

Quoted alongside Sharansky, Rina Lapidus, a Bar Ilan University professor of Russian literature, said Solzhenitsyn “was no saint” and that the treatment of Jews in his works demonstrated that.

Lapidus, whose grandfather was killed in the gulag, noted that it was well known that Jews were disproportionately represented in the gulag prisoner population, but Solzhenitsyn ignored this fact in his work, and his treatment of Jewish issues was a product of the traditional Russian culture which he advocated.

If Jewish activists were over-represented in the leadership of the revolution, then they were also over-represented among the gulag victims of the same revolution, as they were over- represented among Soviet dissidents. When the socialist revolution took hold, they were there. When the Soviet model turned into a catastrophe, they were there, battling its atrocities. And when dissidents were punished, they were made the prime example of the heartlessness of the regime. Each time, their participation would tick off a different set of people.

For Solzhenitsyn, the Jewish role in Bolshevism is what mattered most, while what had been before, or came after, was less important or relevant. As Anthony Julius might say, he made a prosecutor’s case against the Jews, concentrating on everything bad that could be said about their role in communism, cold or indifferent to Jewish pain and suffering under the very regime that inspired him to write his gulag trilogy.

So there it is, another mystery of the writerly mind: that it can be both great and petty, insightful, unique and populist at the same time, universal in ambition and illiberal in personal inclination, egalitarian yet prejudiced. It’s the eternal transitoriness of human nature, I guess. As Martha Nussbaum says:

“I do not go about fearing any and every catastrophe anywhere in the world, nor (so it seems) do I fear any and every catastrophe that I know to be bad in important ways. What inspires fear is the thought of damages impending that cut to the heart of my own cherished relationships and projects. What inspires grief is the death of someone beloved, someone who has been an important part of one’s own life…. the emotions… take their stand in my own life, and focus on the transition between light and darkness there, rather than on the general distribution of light and darkness in the universe as a whole.”

Solzhenitsyn was first and foremost a person, a man, a husband and father, fiercely Russian, a dissident, a writer and possibly one-sided in favour of his own “cherished relationships and projects”.

And so we, as his readers, are persons instructed by our own identities and histories; when we read, we pay more attention to what we consider our own “cherished relationships and projects”.