Daniel J. Mahoney’s “Rekindling the Sparks of the Spirit” rightly views Solzhenitsyn’s great work as a tool by which the Western world, all too eager to follow the “road to catastrophe” that led to the gulag archipelago, might relight the fire of “those scruples, those essential elements of our humanity” that will guide us on ways of peace. Those elements of our humanity, he tells us, are “common sense and moral conscience where good and evil first come to sight.” Mahoney identifies the means by which Solzhenitsyn conducts this “experiment in literary investigation” as a combination of history (gained from documents and oral accounts) and memoir. The latter aspect is certainly filled with details, but the details are given for the purpose of “the search for self-knowledge in a manner that he himself calls Socratic.” The self-knowledge he sought is not merely an account of his own soul or experience but of “the truth of the soul and the order of things.”
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