Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman

Slavophile and Westernizer Against the Totalitarian Soviet State

Author(s): Veljko Vujačić
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: Solzhenitsyn;Grossman;Soviet Union;totalitarianism;
Summary/Abstract: Gregory Freidin argues that in the Soviet Union authorship became the symbolic equivalent of citizenship. The notion of citizenship in this context, however, only partially overlapped with the Western emphasis on formal rights. As Freidin explains, this was because in the Soviet-Russian context the modern roles of the writer as professional and “symbolic citizen” were superimposed on the earlier Orthodox Christian notion of “the holy man’s invocation of a divine calling” whose “preoccupation with ethical and spiritual questions which have no other public forum in Russia except literature becomes inseparable from prophecy or spiritual enlightenment.” As a result “the “modern individualism of literary expression recalls the individuality of sainthood, and the victimization by such a modern rational institution as the political police comes to be identified with a tradition of martyrdom.” This belief in the charismatic power of the author cum holy man-prophet-martyr was shared by the party authorities and the loyal writers with the consequence that literature became “a dynamic force in its own right”; in other words, a social and political factor to be reckoned with.

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