Calamities of Exile Two books survey the embattled intellectual legacies of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Edward Said—and point up some surprising paralle

Edward Said and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, dissident heroes of two sharply divergent political traditions, had a surprising amount in common. Both came from cultures that had been violently uprooted and dislocated; both were exiled, their lives threatened; both found refuge eventually in the United States—and became outspoken critics of this country. Both fought the regimes they opposed with words and the application of counternarrative. Both wrote famous accusatory tomes—Orientalism (1978), The Gulag Archipelago (1973)—that, through the sheer accrual of evidence, fundamentally altered the worlds they described.

Most interesting of all, both lived to see their political projects succeed to a degree they could never have anticipated. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; Israel acknowledged the existence of the Palestinian people, and their right to a state, in the 1993 Oslo Accords. And both writers were, immediately and thoroughly, critical of what had once seemed their fondest wishes: While the West celebrated the Yeltsin regime, Solzhenitsyn warned that it was in irresponsible free fall; at almost the same moment, Said denounced Oslo as “a Palestinian Versailles.” Both, sadly, were right.

The Soul and Barbed Wire:

An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn

by Jr. Ericson, Edward E. and Alexis Klimoff

$28.00 List Price

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The Legacy of Edward W. Said

by William V. Spanos

$25.00 List Price

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An attitude toward the Jews has long stood in for an attitude toward modernity. Said was postmodern and Solzhenitsyn was premodern, though it’s unclear which of their worldviews will dominate the century to come. (Solzhenitsyn’s civilizational account of the world had a lot in common with that of Samuel Huntington, the man on whom Said spent more time pouring scorn in the last few years of his life than anyone except maybe Ariel Sharon.) Both questioned the effects of the Enlightenment on the contemporary world. Solzhenitsyn argued for the centrality of a group of people living for a long time in a particular place; Said argued for the centrality of those who have been chased from their homes forever—a steadily increasing proportion of the globe’s population.

If we are living, as we seem to be, in the last days of the neoliberal consensus, it means these kind of arguments, which the promoters of that consensus once dismissed or deemed permanently settled, will return again. Do we need a poststructuralist or a humanist Said? A merely anti-Soviet or a positively Russo-civilizational Solzhenitsyn? In the end, we’ll take what we need—but we should remember, as we build from a necessary base of solidarity, that some thinkers will forever be outside any camp, and there’s no use trying to enlist them.