11 ms·
Nobel archives reveal judges’ safety fears for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 1123581321 6y agoWho is the woman in the photo? Is that his second wife?
- clort 6y agothe caption says it is "his wife, Natalia" However, Wikipedia says both his wives were called Natalia. He married the second one after receiving the Nobel.
- yaakov34 6y agoThe woman in the photo is his second wife, Natalia née Svetlova.
- yaakov34 6y agoYes, it's his second wife, and the photo was taken in 1972 when he was visiting Mstislav Rostropovich. There is another photo from the same series here: https://rg.ru/2019/12/10/vospominaniia-solzhenicyna-o-tom-kak-shkolnye-gody-opredelili-ego-harakter.html https://rg.ru/2019/12/10/vospominaniia-solzhenicyna-o-tom-ka...
- 1123581321 6y agoThank you!
- carrolldunham 6y agoSolzhenitsyn seems beloved by HN so - what did you all think of Two Hundred Years Together?
- dominicjj 6y agoOutstanding book by one of the greatest of Russian authors that should be required reading today.
- imwillofficial 6y agoSeconded.
- gvv 6y agothirded
- yaakov34 6y agoI don't think anything good about it. Apart from the standard anti-Semitic polemic, which innovates nothing, he insulted a number of people whom he had no right to insult, and reinvented a number of episodes of his own biography in a self-serving and mendacious way. If you wish to look into it, you can start here: http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2003/0723/win/badash.htm http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2003/0723/win/badash.htm
- ultrastable 6y agoexactly. their deification of Solzhenitsyn is a good example of the moral bankruptcy of many Cold War anticommunists - in the end he was just another reactionary who saw the USSR as the latest example of sinister Jewish interference w/ the rightful course of Russian history
- kome 6y agoi have no idea why people are down-voting you, you speak the truth. the cold war era was often driven by "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of logic.
- andrepd 6y agoNowhere so strong as in the US: supporting genocides across the planet because they were "bulwarks against communism" is very strange indeed.
- publicola1990 6y agoA cold war mentality is still pervading many Western sources, here even when the article itself does not have any inkling that physical safety of Solzhenitsyn was ever a cause for concern, the headline makes it so feeding a certain perception. The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s. Solzhenitsyn was also a fierce critic of the West, and many who thought who would find him a pro-western voice was gravely surprised in his further commentary after coming to the west. From his commencement address Harvard/78: "Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events."
- kybernetyk 6y ago>The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s. Yet it was still the Soviet Union and people disappeared.
- oytis 6y ago> The Soviet Union of the 1970s was not the Soviet Union of the 30s. Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov has been assassinated by KGB in 1978
- andrepd 6y ago
- motohagiography 6y agoUnsurprising, given the one thing that regime could not allow to prevail was truth, documentary or literary. Soviets ultimately used communism as a distraction for their totalitarian aim, which was dominion by creating a mental hall of mirrors that isolated each person from their own humanity and subordinated them to the "state," which itself was by every other account of regular purges and fear, just another kind of multi-layered chaotic hell as well. Once you were arguing, to engage at all meant you were already implicated and compromised by your "class," as the ideology and intellectual conflict was not their real tool, it was the bait for the trap that identified potential people with the instinct to resist, as the true aim of a totalitarian movement is to destroy all possible resistance by unmooring people from any concept or belief in truth. That is, for good men to do nothing. It's the intellectual strategy of the same kind of people today, to destabilize, leverage chaos, and reduce people to their animal level political instincts instead of allowing us to use our higher capacity for principle, order, and reason. That's the great game, between order and chaos. Solzhenitsyn (and earlier, Hannah Arendt) wrote a warning for all time about the tactics of what is an essential and ancient evil. I'm kind of what you would call "the first to stop clapping." The things people talk about in the culture wars today are the same thing. Without a meta-understanding of them, we're going to fall prey to the same tactics.