Critical Theory from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: Style, Technique, and Ideologiekritik

Abstract

Throughout the almost two thousand pages of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago there radiates an excoriating condemnation of the Soviet state. However, though it is doubtless true that “Solzhenitsyn repudiates Marxism” (Medvedev 1974b: 69), a now axiomatic reading of The Gulag Archipelago and his other works, this does not rule out The Gulag Archipelago as a source for critical theorizing and social analysis in our own time. I argue that Solzhenitsyn cannot so easily be quarantined off from the practices, predicates, and propensities of the critical or even marxian tradition, just as one cannot really say that there are no tools of critical theory in Solzhenitsyn’s prose. There exists a more nuanced relationship in The Gulag Archipelago to the deeper tradition of critical philosophy through and beyond marxian critique. Most scholarship on Solzhenitsyn-the-Man has repeatedly read the book as a conservative counter-revolutionary tract, a view which has been entrenched since its original publication in the early 1970s. The consequence is that The Gulag Archipelago itself has today been incorporated into the totalizing reputation of Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, but a reputation mostly earned by Solzhenitsyn in other places. The triumphant, Fukuyamist, post-Soviet, and largely Atlanticist secondary scholarship has variously stressed Solzhenitsyn’s metaphysical idealism, religiosity (Ericson and Mahoney xli), conservative constitutionalism (Rowley; Ericson and Mahoney xxxix), anti-modernism (Tempest 2010), authoritarianism (Congdon 56–57; Laber 4), ethno-nationalism (Confino; Yanov 565–66; Mandel 56), Counter-Enlightenment proclivities (Medvedev 1974b: 71), and even putative propinquity to the extreme Right on certain issues (Rowley 336). However, though these observations and assessments have emerged primarily from his later publitsistika writings of the 1990s, they have generally built upon the condemnatory assessment of The Gulag Archipelago that emerged from the Left at the time it was first published in English in 1974. It is from this early critical literature that the enduring portrait of The Gulag Archipelago emerges as a work of