Thwarted thunderbolts

The even-keeled Sheila Fitzpatrick navigates 970 pages of a Solzhenitsyn biography and lives to (re)tell the tale. It's perhaps the best -- relatively short -- assessment of the Russian author.

The Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for Solzhenitsyn’s return in 1994, which he staged with typical élan and instinct for publicity, taking a train from Vladivostok and proceeding through the length of Russia to Moscow. There isn’t a theatre director in the world who could have thought that one up, [biographer] Saraskina comments (admiringly). It was intended as the return of the Prophet Vindicated, filmed in every detail by the BBC, but it didn’t quite come off. Too late, many said; a great figure, but now irrelevant. Solzhenitsyn was equal to that, plunging again into one of his favourite roles, that of Jeremiah. The Russia he discovered in the mid-1990s was a moral sink, national consciousness and spiritual traditions lost, criminality rampant, party and Duma politics contemptible, the plight of the Russian people appalling and ignored by the new-rich rulers, privatisation a theft of public assets in broad daylight, Russia’s ‘liberal’ intellectuals as posturing and out of touch as ever, the break-up of the empire and consequent loss of Russia’s ‘iconic regions, outlets to the sea, and millions of Russian people’ a catastrophe, ‘shock therapy’ an outrage, even the Russian language corrupted. As for the free Russian press, they were a bunch of jackals, worse than the Cheka.

(pic via Flickr)