Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubGessen on Sozhenitsyn and Said
At Bookforum Keith Gessen surveys the struggle for intellectual ownership over Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Edward Said. “Both wrote famous accusatory tomes… that, through the sheer accrual of evidence, fundamentally altered the worlds they described.”
A reader writes to criticize Gessen’s article and Gessen responds, “Anyone who emerges from my piece on Edward Said and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn believing that I am hostile toward Solzhenitsyn can only believe that any form of skepticism is an act of outright aggression at their sainted battler against godless Communism—which, incidentally, is also the position of the Solzhenitsyn book I was reviewing.”
Leave a Reply