"Telling the Truth about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn"

Over at Law & Liberty, there's a podcast with Daniel Mahoney about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, his work, his reception, his legacy, etc.  Here's part of the intro:

Comes now the great Daniel J. Mahoney, author of penetrating intellectual biographies of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Charles de Gaulle, among other books, to discuss his latest work, The Other Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney, co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, provides us in this discussion a tremendous introduction to the Russian dissident writer’s corpus of writings and a rebuttal to his many critics.

We might say that most western writers who, from their position of faux outrage, frequently critique their governments, societies, and cultures have Solzhenitsyn envy, earnestly desiring that their work could perform something even close to the role of the Russian anti-communist writer par excellence. Not that they admire Solzhenitsyn’s political and moral philosophy, and his belief that freedom is ultimately born of spiritual commitment, but that no one will ever say of their work that it put a “sliver in the throat of power.”  Such was the praise given Solzhenitsyn after the publication of One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. . . .

Whenever those polls and quizzes asking for "lists of 10 books that changed your life" or "that stayed with you" circulate on Facebook, Ivan Denisovich is always one of my ten.  (I wrote on of my college-application essays on his Cancer Ward and remember clearly buying "Warning to the West" at a bookstore in Cambridge, MA during a Spring Break visit to a friend there.  Yes, I am a geek.)  

Solzhenitsyn was, of course, a hero to the anti-communists in the United States during the Cold War, but his popularity waned as he turned his critical idea to western materialism, consumerism, etc.  Also, many critics today see him as "anti-democratic, theocratic, and pro-Putin, to name a few[.]"  In the podcast, Mahoney discusses and responds to these critics' claims.