First Things RSS Feed - Robert P. Kraynak https://www.firstthings.com/author/robert-p-kraynak en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:55:22 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/robert-p-kraynak 60 Solzhenitsyn and the Battle for the Human Soul https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/08/solzhenitsyn-and-the-battle-fo https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/08/solzhenitsyn-and-the-battle-fo Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 A great man died last week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and we need to think about how to honor and remember him. Otherwise, he will fade into history as a great figure of the twentieth century who played a major role¯along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II¯in defeating totalitarian communism in Russia and Eastern Europe; but he will have no living legacy in the post-communist age, when radical Islam has replaced the totalitarian threat and new problems have arisen in the Putin era of Russia.

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]]> Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-ascent-from-ideology https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-ascent-from-ideology Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 -0500 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, is not yet dead, but he is in danger of fading into oblivion in the West and of being dismissed as a crank in his own country. This is a terrible shame. For Solzhenitsyn is one of the giants of the twentieth century”a heroic witness to truth who resisted Communist tyranny and exposed the horrors of Soviet forced“labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago . He is also a powerful novelist whose works of historical fiction” The First Circle, August 1914, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ”depict the enduring struggles between good and evil in the human heart.

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