What was the biggest influence Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made on Soviet life and culture?
He de-legitimized the Soviet experiment—that was an experiment in utopian thinking to create the new man. He identified the ideology, not power, as the root issue of the Soviet issue and showed that it was anti-human and really false to the nature of human beings and to the nature of the universe. In other words, Marxism, Leninism was not just one ideological option among many. It was the wrong ideology. How were you inspired to focus so much of your scholarship on Solzhenitsyn? I thought that he told the truth in literary form about human nature and the nature of the universe. When I first read him, I didn’t know what he believed. I didn’t know he was a Christian. He hadn’t made that explicit. I thought at the time that either this man is a Christian or he might as well be. Everything he says about human beings and the universe, the moral order that pervades the whole universe, is what Christianity propounds. … .We’re familiar with worldview talk, and that’s what I saw in Solzhenitsyn
