When the multiple crises of an entire civilization have severely shaken men's confidence in its survival, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn questions the basic goals of that civilization and the direction in which it has been heading for some centuries. To do so is to challenge a much cherished cluster of beliefs about humans and their destiny that together make up, as he wrote inLetter to the Soviet Leaders (1974), "the entire culture and world outlook which were conceived at the time of the Renaissance and attained the peak of their expression with the eighteenth century Enlightenment."

Solzhenitsyn speaks not from the depths of a chair of political science or sociology, but out of the depths of the Gulag Archipelago: "I belong as much to the camps as I do to Russian literature…. There is where I was formed, and for all time," he wrote in a letter to Tvardovsky.