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| Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1974) |
I first read his work when I was up at Cambridge in 1973-6. I devoured One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago. Later, I listened to his Harvard Commencement Address (1978) and read The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America. (1980).
More recently, I discovered and read Deux siècles ensemble (2003) which had not been translated into English, for some reason.
Verhoeff, Bert / Anefo [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
Solzhenitsyn’s mother was widowed before he was born, and the Bolsheviks confiscated her family’s land. When World War II broke out, Solzhenitsyn left university in Rostov to serve as an officer in the Russian military. He was arrested in 1945 for comments made in a private letter to a friend, critical of Stalin. He was sentenced to eight years in the Soviet camp system and was eventually released into perpetual exile in Kazakhstan. By 1962, Solzhenitsyn was able to return to Russia but he did not dare to publish work he had been writing. Following an apparent thaw under Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn took the risk of sending – anonymously – a short story about one day in a camp prisoner’s life to a literary journal. It was Khrushchev himself who finally gave permission for the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Solzhenitsyn had to work in secret on his next text which was eventually smuggled out of the country and published in France. From there it was quickly translated into many languages, and the whole world learned the truth about the enormity of Soviet crimes in The Gulag Archipelago.
During his time in the archipelago, Solzhenitsyn rejected the Marxist, atheistic materialism of his youth and embraced the Christian faith. He rejected the Marxist claims that some groups and classes of human beings are good and others bad and saw clearly that the dividing line between good and evil lies in each human heart. He was to observe that the movement away from the evils of atheistic materialism (by those who had experienced it) was taking place at the very same time that the 'free' West was moving closer and closer to embracing its tyranny. This was some time before the emergence in the West of relativist, subjectivist and identitarian ideology.
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008 aged 89. His funeral service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, where he was buried in a spot he had chosen. Requiescat In Pace,
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