Anita Kondoyanidi

On December 14, 2008, in the Manezh building just outside the Kremlin, an exhibit dedicated to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life was hosting its last visitors. The writer’s widow Natalia led one of her grandsons around and narrated for him the films and photographs of his famous grandfather. Usually latecomers flock to exhibits the day before they close, but the Manezh was eerily empty that Sunday, demonstrating what a controversial legacy Solzhenitsyn had left in his own country. Having fought against the Soviet regime, he returned to Russia in 1994, but his views soon made him unpopular with his own countrymen. Socrates once described himself as the “gadfly” of Athens because he questioned popularly-held assumptions relentlessly in pursuit of a higher wisdom. While Solzhenitsyn avoided the ultimate fate of his ancient predecessor, his criticism of Soviet, Western, and post-Soviet Russian society also made him an outcast. His transcendence of the Cold War trope that pitted the “good” W...