Solzhenitsyn: A Giant of History Goes

One of my personal heroes has died, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He single-handedly triumphed over the supposedly invincible Soviet Union during the midst of the Cold War. The New York Times has a long profile worth the reading. The photo at right is titled: Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the 1950s at the Kazakh prison camp that inspired “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.”

“Gulag” was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

But it wouldn't be the NYT if they didn't express puzzlement at the great man's indictment of the corrupting and decaying culture of the country that accepted him in exile, the United States.

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

That address, which he titled A World Split Apart, is one of the more prophetic utterances I have ever read. Orthodoxy Today says: "Solzhenitsyn's warning of Western decline is as relevant today as it was twenty-five years ago.

I must credit Solzhenitsyn for his role in my own journey, from liberal Democrat as a youth, like my parents, grandparents and who knows how far back, to conservative Republican; and also from nominal Christianity as a Methodist to genuine, born-again Christianity as a Baptist.

Reading first his novels, then later his nonfiction works had a profound influence on my own thinking. I look forward to the day when I shall sit down in glory and have a long discussion with the author, perhaps for a thousand years or so, just to get warmed up. Godspeed, Brother Alex.