After some meandering, you hit the nail on the head in the last paragraph of your obituary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: he was a Russian nationalist (August 9, 2008). Steeped in Russian Orthodoxy, all he had to say about the world into which he was born is that it should somehow return to some mythical past, when everything was as it should be: the tsar, the patriarch, the boyars, and the merry peasants. That is the world he longed for without understanding it an iota. Neither did he understand the world surrounding his beloved Russia. All he had to say about it was that it was not Russia, and that it was thus worthless. Now, the only reason for this letter is that it points at one of the major problems of our time: Russian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn is of interest not as a writer, although he was not a mean one, but as a personification of that blind nationalism. As such, he does not deserve flowery words of praise, but careful scrutiny. And much vigilance in the years to come.