Before White Guilt afflicted American liberals, the Russian intelligentsia set a precedent of their own. Famous professor of Russian literature Gary Saul Morson joins the Dorx to talk about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago, which leads to so much more: the self-hatred of educated people; political orthodoxy; peer monitoring; doublethink; whether consciously telling falsehoods is lying; neurodivergence; literary appropriation; terrorism as a career path; the charisma of ruthlessness; and Nina’s fetish for shoe polish. Solzhenitsyn saw the US heading in the same direction as Soviet Russia, and if you listen to this episode you might too.

Links:

Prof. Gary Saul Morson: https://slavic.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/morson-gary-saul.html

The Masterpiece of Our Time: on The Gulag Archipelago at 50: https://newcriterion.com/article/the-masterpiece-of-our-time/

Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678113/morning-after-the-revolution-by-nellie-bowles/

The Age of White Guilt by Shelby Steele: https://www.cir-usa.org/2002/11/the-age-of-white-guilt-and-the-disappearance-of-the-black-individual/

Mosaic of Minds blog: https://mosaicofmindss.substack.com/

Living My Life by Emma Goldman: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-living-my-life

The God That Failed: https://chinhnghia.com/the-god-that-failed.pdf

Wonder Confronts Certainty by Gary Saul Morson: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674971806