Religious and Moral Ideas in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Journalism

Abstract

The paper uses journalistic works (op-ed pieces for the media, speeches, press conferences, interviews, etc.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to reveal the formation and development of religious and moral issues in the writer's worldview. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued the historical line of Russian political and social thought, which had always been characterized by polyphony, ambiguity, and variability. The writer himself had repeatedly drawn attention to how important it is to understand the dependence of philosophical attitudes of a thinker on their life experience and age. In the mature period of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's career, the main aspects of his religious idea can be highlighted. Firstly, the opposition to the ideological legacy of the rationalist philosophy of the modern age and the criticism of the idea of constant progress as an example of “delusional philosophy”, the desire to legitimize the sacred in the political discourse, the postulation of the need to abandon the political language in reflections on social problems and return to the language of spiritual and moral writings can be mentioned here. Secondly, this is the recognition of the organic connection of religious consciousness with the national cultural type, the critical attitude to globalism and unification, the desire to preserve the national identity as a guarantee of the spiritual development of mankind, since a nation emerges around a religious idea and preserves it. The paper also examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's understanding of the phenomenon of the nation and the intelligentsia, as well as the reasons for the writer's skeptical attitude to the prospects of cultural convergence between East and West. According to the writer, both competing models of sociopolitical development — bourgeois democratic capitalism and the communist utopia of economic equality — are based on the same spiritual foundations: rationalism and naive Rousseaism in understanding human nature, cosmopolitanism and recognition of the issue of the distribution of wealth as the key issue of human existence. The convergence of social systems suffering from the same vices in their slightly different forms would lead to nothing but the multiplication of these vices.