I just received my copy of Daniel Mahoney’s new The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker. Dan has already provided us an excellent overall interpretation of the Russian writer, certainly one of the great minds and great men of the 20th century (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology). This new book’s starting point is the rampant misinformation that has become received opinion regarding Solzhenitsyn. Even sympathetic critics succumb to a facile dichotomy between Western liberalism and atavistic Russian nationalism, and thus assign Solzhenitsyn to the reductive category of “slavophile,” and even dismiss him as “theocratic.” This is a costly mistake, Mahoney explains, because it dismisses the careful and tempered reasoning behind what is perhaps the century’s greatest example of moral and political courage. Mahoney presents Solzhenitsyn as “a theorist of self-government” who “did not advocate a ‘return to the past’ but a shaping of the future in accord with the best national traditions,” and who combined Christian universalism with a healthy respect for the duties and necessities of political action.

Mahoney acknowledges that Solzhenitsyn’s “occasionally polemical or brusque tone” contributed to distortions of his image, but he also shows that the almost universally received clichés used to dismiss the perennial relevance of the Russian’s views are plainly and repeatedly contradicted in his public speeches and writings.

Let us wish this book the success it deserves in correcting the distortions and discrediting the caricatures that prevent a great man and a great writer from exercising the healthy influence he might otherwise have.

Finally, Mahoney’s book reminds me of a more general truth that we would do well to keep in mind: All the smart people can be just plain wrong. Prestigious intellectuals are no more immune to thoughtless shortcuts and the influence of received opinions than the rest of us. Daniel Mahoney’s important book reminds us that thinking our way out of the cave of dominant opinion requires hard work and continual vigilance, because our poets tend to become captive to the very shadows they project.