It is a conceit of the modern world, and particularly of the West, Solzhenitsyn suggests, that history is governed by reason. Reason is like an axe to the living, growing tree of history, with its convoluted branches, each cell and molecule emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one building upon the next—so that great events arise from innumerable plots and threads. Solzhenitsyn in these books provides a treatise on unreason and the subsequent creation of the modern world in the 20th century, in which the axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when it does fall sometimes produces
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