Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: the death of a modern prophet

In the midst of our modern chaos people die and often go unnoticed. Consider the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, both of whom died on November 22, 1963. As history would have it, that also happened to be the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, forever relegating Lewis and Huxley's contributions to a minor role in the larger drama of that day.

Let us not allow the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to go similarly unnoticed. This past Sunday, August 3, there died a man who rose from obscurity to become one of the 20th century's modern literary prophets. It was the power of his pen which eventually contributed to the crumbling of the Soviet empire, through such books as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago, among many others. As The New York Times obituary tribute says, it was of the The Gulag Archipelago that American diplomat George F. Kennan said, it was “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

Dr. Albert Mohler on his blog cites a section of The Gulag Archipelago which gets to the heart of the struggle in which Solzhenitsyn was engaged:

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn explained why the story had to be told:

"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

Solzhenitsyn went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but along with such honors for his work came eventual explusion from his native Russia in 1974. Only in 1994 did he return after the fall of the regime he sought to dismantle. For it was his life experiences in the Russian gulag which put to death the notion that the godless regimes in Communist Russia had humanity's best interests at heart.

Do not underestimate the greatness of this man, nor the pervasive effect his literary epochs continue to have. (The sheer size of the obituary tribute in The New York Times should give us a slight indication of his influence)  His contributions to modern history are significant. Again quoting the NYT article:

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”

The literary force that was Solzhenitsyn will continue to be reckoned with, because it was driven by his continual effort to promote truth and transparency concerning Communism. Thus, we can echo the famous proverb that defined Solzhenitsyn himself (and which he presented in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech): "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world." And so it has.

Comments

[Steven Carr]

He was anti-Semitic. After all, he was part of the Russian Orthodox Church and a commited Christian.

[John]

Steven, I'm not sure how being a committed Christian automatically makes one an anti-Semite. Certainly, there are "Christians" who have expressed anti-Semitic attitudes/actions toward Jews, and their unChristian behavior should never be justified. But your equation that all Christians are necessarily anti-Semitic seems vastly overstated. After all, it's difficult to see how genuine Christians are anti-Semitic when the Christian worldview is based on conforming one's life to that of Jesus Christ, a Jew.