Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism

Abstract

No one has contributed more to western consciousness of contemporary Russian nationalism than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.' By the early 1970s, observers had begun to note a rising nostalgia for things Russian in the Soviet Union. It was, however, Solzhenitsyn's publicistic writings after his expulsion to the west in 1974 that dramatically drew western attention to the revival of Russian national consciousness. His surprising attack on Marxism as a western ideology, his antipathy to the materialism, individualism and atheism that he saw at the heart of western civilization, and his call for a regeneration of traditional Russian values quickly earned Solzhenitsyn the epithet 'Russian nationalist'.