Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. (Booktalk: taking Zolzhenitsyn seriously).

By Daniel J. Mahoney Rowman & Littlefield, 200 pages, $21.95

The Soviet Union has vanished from the map, the Cold War has ended, and communism lies discredited. Yet the West has unfinished business with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Experts do not deny that Solzhenitsyn had a hand in effecting one of history's great watershed moments, but they generally acknowledge his role only grudgingly. Why? Because Western liberals, after initially lionizing Solzhenitsyn, later settled into an ideologically driven consensus that he is an alien figure with retrograde views, beginning with his religious commitment.

Ironically, the fall of communism gave Solzhenitsyn's detractors a new reason to dismiss him: He is, in one critic's words, "yesterday's man." The truth is, even if Solzhenitsyn's relevance were limited to the Soviet context he would deserve a permanent place in history books as our era's greatest example of the adage that "the pen is mightier than the sword." But even that honorific treats the writer solely in political terms and ignores his wider insights on perennial moral issues.

Enter Daniel Mahoney, a prolific, prize-winning political scientist who challenges the common wisdom: "Solzhenitsyn is rarely given credit for his monumental contribution to the cause of human liberty in our time. In fact, there has been no more successful effort to discredit a great writer and thinker than that carried out against Solzhenitsyn over the past 25 years." Mahoney's book restores the Russian writer to the relevance he had before Western critics turned away from him. Beyond that, it advances the field of Solzhenitsyn criticism by a quantum leap. The introduction is called "Taking Solzhenitsyn Seriously," and Mahoney's mastery of Solzhenitsyn's texts is encyclopedic.

One of Mahoney's best contributions is his documentation of Solzhenitsyn as a man of decidedly moderate politics, instead of offering the "anti-democratic extremist" caricature. In another surprise, Mahoney shows how Solzhenitsyn is both deeply in love with Russia and also steeped in the West's political and philosophical traditions. A "careful student of political history and political institutions" Solzhenitsyn favors strong grassroots democracy, a market economy, land reform, and environmentalism. He praises the West for its "rule of law," post-Soviet Russia s most conspicuous deficiency. As Mahoney fleshes out the portrait, Solzhenitsyn emerges as "a teacher of moderation, a chronicler of modern faith in progress gone awry, an anti-ideologue par excellence" He is "an elegant and moving writer and a penetrating guide to the political and spiritual dislocations of our time"; "a spirited Christian who combines immense personal courage and authoritative moral witness with measured patriotism and a profound ...