Solzhenitsyn was a good author. His novel In the First Circle is excellent. I highly recommend if people haven’t read it. In that novel, there’s a really funny character whom the author gently mocks for his extreme Russian nationalism. The dude is so Russian, he avoids using any foreign words, including “engineer” and “mathematics”, which is quite hard given that he’s a mathematician. He’s also immoral and shallow, in spite of prattling incessantly about morality.
I’m going into so much detail about this character because after mocking this type of mealy-mouthed, holier-than-though, abnormally nationalistic individual… Solzhenitsyn turned into exactly that kind of person. The large series of historical novels he wrote later in life is impossible to read because the author’s avoidance of foreign words makes the text sound ridiculous.
In what concerns his ideas, Solzhenitsyn hated Jews and Ukrainians, and his entire ideology revolved against the narcissistic wound inflicted on his Russian soul by their existence. But In the First Circle is still absolutely worth reading. And so is Cancer Ward which is weaker but still good.
US lefties detest Solzhenitsyn because he told the truth about the horrors of Stalinism. He’s not much liked in Russia today for the same reason.
Clarissa's Blog 
I was not aware of these traits in Solzhenitsyn who remains a favourite of mine since I only know him as a writer and an intellectual. Other literary heroes of mine had terrible characters – Orwell for example, Joyce also comes to mind – but again, I esteem them for their writing as they never were my friends.
However, I was intrigued by “the narcissistic wound inflicted on his Russian soul by the existence of Jews and Ukrainians“. Could you expand more on that? I am sure that many readers of the blog would benefit from being enlightened in this respect.
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Russians are unhappy with the oversize impact of Ukrainians and Jews on their politics and culture. Like it’s anybody’s fault that they can’t figure out their own lives.
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Well, Russians do live on the fringes of civilization, the furthest away from the coastal elites. Something they have in common with Tump’s America living in the flyover country of their respective continents.
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I suppose the history and geography of Russia have a lot to account for when considering the national psyche. Russia is not a fully European state, and its huge territory stretching all over the way across northern Asia and, until 1867, well into North America, means that nation-building as undergone historically by Western European countries is out of the question. The issue is fraught with ideologically laden beliefs that may be hard to disentangle. Ideas like Russkaya mysl’ and Russkiy mir are difficult concepts to render in Western European languages, as there is no readily available equivalent, in that they are culture specific.
The situation is emblematically and mystifyingly represented by the crucial distinction between русский and российский, the former referring to an ethnic Russian – who may or may not be a citizen of the Russian Federation – while the latter refers to a citizen of the Russian Federation who may actually be of any nationality, like a Chechen or a Tatar.
I still remember my shock when, back in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my then Russian girlfriend (!) violently remonstrated with me because I had called Rudolf Nureyev “russkiy”. When I asked her to explain, she was in convulsions as she expostulated, “On ne russkiy, on bashkir”, that is, Nureyev was not “Russian”, he was Bashkir.
But I am sure that this blog’s owner will be able to clarify the issue much more correctly and painstakingly than I ever will.
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