Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 200 Years Together. Vol. …（200年亚历山大u2022索尔仁尼琴在一起。）.pdfVIP

ABSTRACT 1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s controversial book, 200 Years Together , 2001-2002, is both a problematic scholarly work on Russian-Jewish history and, perhaps more importantly, a particular ideological statement. This analysis explores the methodology and presentation of Solzhenitsyn’s research in order to test its scholarly qualities and the premise of impartiality repeatedly asserted throughout the text. Working primarily with the secondary literature and rather tendentious primary sources, Solzhenitsyn not only fails to deliver “a path-breaking” treatment of the history of Jews in Russia that he and his publishers promised, but also consistently manipulates historical evidence to support his own conservative nationalist viewpoint. The second part of this paper analyzes the passionate public debate unleashed by the publication of each volume, that owes its poignancy not only to the ever-sensitive subject of the book and the particular political and intellectual context of cont emporary Russian society, but also to the moral authority that Solzhenitsyn still enjoys in Russia. It is Solzhenitsyn’s reputation and the moralizing role traditionally bestowed upon writers in Russia that seem to have eclipsed for many of his readers (and for a large part of the liberal intelligentsia in particular) the chauvinistic overtones in much of his oeuvre. The range of the issues that are at stake in both the work itself and its public reception touches upon the notions of identity, memory, history, and repentance, and thus has little to do with the “Jewish question,” while everything to do with the “Russian” o