Solzhenitsyn and We

Abstract

One of the characters in Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, the procurator's daughter Klara, learned very well back in her school days what a boring thing literature was: "… Turgenev, confined within his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov, connected to the Russian capitalism that was coming into being; Lev Tolstoy, with his transition to the positions of the patriarchal peasantry. …" Like her girlfriends, Klara can't understand "why so much attention was paid to these people anyway; they were not the smartest people (critics, writers on public affairs, and, in particular, party figures were all smarter than they), they were often in error, they got tangled up in contradictions that were plain to any school student, they kept falling under alien influences—and yet these were the people that compositions have to be written about. …"