Solzhenitsyn And Orthodoxy
I discovered a wide-ranging, multipart esasay by Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn in the USA , which can be found on the web but was first published in Church and State No.122, Oct-Dec 2015. His treatment of the subject is multidimensional and something I hadn't previously encountered, but it answers a lot of questions that had been in the back of my mind. I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, including all of The Gulag Archipelago , much of it at least twice. It came out in English in the mid-1970s, subtitled "an experiment in literary investigation", not long after I discovered Milton's prose, to which I think it bears a close if unintentional relation. Solzhenitsyn and Milton were deeply religious men, if highly idiosyncratic in their views, who bent literary genre to their highly idiosyncratic purposes. As a writer, I fell under the influence of both. Now in the context of the Russo-Ukraine War, there seems to be an emerging if so far inchoate movement to reevalua...