SOURCE: "The Solzhenitsyn That Nobody Knows," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, pp. 634-41.

In the following essay, Ragsdale associates Matryona of "Matryona's Home " with Mother Russia, and probes the cultural concerns espoused in the work, calling it "the Slavophile protest against urbanism, technology, alcohol, against the neglect of old folk values."

For the second time Alexander Solzhenitsyn last year returned home from exile. He has had a house built in the environs of Moscow, where he plans to take up residence. He foreswears politics, yet he publicly condemns revolutions—both French and Russian—and declares that Russia should be a unified state rather than a "false confederation." He himself has said that the presence of a great writer at home is tantamount to an alternative government in the country. A recent poll in Petersburg found far more sympathy for him than for anyone in Russia's present...