Short Story Criticism | Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr - Hugh Ragsdale (essay date 1995)

Hugh Ragsdale (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: "The Solzhenitsyn That Nobody Knows," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, pp. 634-41.

[In the following essay, Ragsdale associates Matryona of "Matryona's Home " with Mother Russia, and probes the cultural concerns espoused in the work, calling it "the Slavophile protest against urbanism, technology, alcohol, against the neglect of old folk values."]

For the second time Alexander Solzhenitsyn last year returned home from exile. He has had a house built in the environs of Moscow, where he plans to take up residence. He foreswears politics, yet he publicly condemns revolutions—both French and Russian—and declares that Russia should be a unified state rather than a "false confederation." He himself has said that the presence of a great writer at home is tantamount to an alternative government in the country. A recent poll in Petersburg found far more sympathy for him than...

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