Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in American historiography: A Christian critic and his secular audience

The theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speech "A World Split Apart": The Harvard Address was Western decline, and his criticisms of Western values and institutions provoked an intellectual backlash against him. Solzhenitsyn was, in consequence, ultimately dismissed as a viable thinker in the West.;This thesis takes as its first aim the critical examination of both the early and later responses to the Harvard Address to determine the patterns and trends of American opinions and evaluations of Solzhenitsyn and his thought at that time. Second, this thesis argues that generally the efforts of Solzhenitsyn's American critics to understand and contextualise him and the Harvard Address were unsatisfactory, as they approached the problem of Solzhenitsyn from a Western perspective and therefore inappropriately based their evaluations of him on current Western political and social ideals. Finally, this thesis is intended to contribute to the ongoing trend of recontextualising Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the 1990s by asserting that Solzhenitsyn is first and foremost a Christian, and that his personal Christianity forms an essential component of his thought. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...