Sidney Monas Replies

Abstract

My essay is basically a review of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, and the BBC interview of February 1979. Other works are mentioned in passing, but I tried to limit myself (as the title indicates, but without being too rigid about it) to works written since Solzhenitsyn’s passage West. In no way does the essay pretend to “sum up” or definitively evaluate the work of Solzhenitsyn. It is not even my own last word on the subject. As John Dunlop indicates, Western historians have tended to take an increasingly dim view of Solzhenitsyn without perhaps proper respect for his literary talent and rhetorical power, whereas those whom Dunlop calls “the best Western literary critics” have tended to roll over and play dead when confronted with his ideological illiberalism and incapacity to enter into dialogue. Though Dunlop professes to admire “centrism,” he seems to have missed my middle course.