Solzhenitsyn-critic: dialogues with writers-predecessors and contemporaries

The article reviews some aspects of the writer's criticism by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: his aesthetic views on literature and art, historical and literary ideas, including religious and philosophical aspects of his world view. These aspects are revealed in the writer's articles from the «Literary Collection», in journalistic prose. The author reveals Solzhenitsyn's attitude to the “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, including his disappointment due to the lack of foundations of Orthodox ethics in the novel. Solzhenitsyn’s judgments about the prose by Ivan Shmelev and Valentin Rasputin, the poetry by Sergei Yesenin reveal the nature of these artists' talent. It is concluded that the criticism of postmodern poetry by Solzhenitsyn is evaluated from the standpoint of rejection of irony, unreasonably great attention to private life, and this writer's subjectivity is explained by the heightened sense of responsibility of the writ-er-citizen to the compatriot reader.