Solzhenitsyn:Rebellious Writing In Historical Context And Cultural Conflicts

How to explain several dramatic changes of standpoints in Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s whole life is still a controversial issue in the Russian and western academic circles. The ideological changes and developments in Solzhenitsyn’s later stage are not even paid due attention to till now in China. To a great extent, it is exactly the same ideologies and cultural mentalities which Solzhenitsyn had deeply worried about and struggled against that lead to the above predicaments of interpretation and reception. On the base of existing research, this study, from the point of view of "the interactions between historical structure and individual", re-hackles the writer’s intellectual life:almost all the historical structures which Solzhenitsyn encountered were shaped by fierce cultural conflicts. Inheriting the powerful tradition of Russian intellectuals, Solzhenitsyn constantly collided with them. He was forced to balance these unbalanced external structures with his rebellious writing, which directly resulted in the "extremeness" and increasingly "conservativeness" of his thought.The experience in the Gulag exorcized Solzhenitsyn. With the special consciousness as a "Russian writer", he started to record the demolishment of the traditional values and social connections made by the high speed modernization process (the First Chapter). The abruption of the "thaw" didn’t prevent him to rebel against those ideologies which were abstracted from the rich and colorful human life and justified the evils. In his works He did his utmost to present the irrationality and openness of history by the polyphonic structure. All of these supported him to call the universality of any model of the development of civilization into question (the Second Chapter). However, Solzhenitsyn didn’t find a link between the political disaster of Russia in the20th century and the spiritual abnormity in the whole West after the Enlightenment until he was exiled to the West where he saw lots of familiar and dangerous phenomena. There were a series of conflicts between the writer, an eternal rebel, and the western society which was net as open as it seemed. While caused him discomforts, cross-cultural experience inspired him and helped him to confirm his cultural view (the Third Chapter). After moving to Vermont and isolate himself from the western society, Solzhenitsyn devoted his life to the writing of the Red Wheel. According to the historical and cultural views mentioned above, he challenged the inevitability and positivity of the Russian revolution, In his description of Imperial Russia, we can also find something hopeful in tune with the writer’s conception of the future path of Russia (the Forth Chapter). Solzhenitsyn went back to his motherland with a plan of rebuilding after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Tragically, he found once more as the result of a fanatical westernization the country was on the edge of collapse. He had to appeal to compatriots for respecting their own tradition with a more extreme attitude (the Fifth Chapter). Considering the historical context of China is so similar to Russia’s, this case will be especially beneficial for us to reflect on the predicaments, risks and possibilities of our culture’s development under the "red wheel" of modernity.