I don't have the words to eulogize the passing of Solzhenitsyn in some grand, universalizing, overdone interpretation meant to capture his significance for the wider world. The newspapers are doing a good enough job without me, some much better than others.
I can only say a paltry few words about what Solzhenitsyn meant to me personally.
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was one of the very, very few books inflicted on us in high school that spoke to me. Enough to waken a moral interest, and reinforce an interest in communist societies, that never shut down afterwards.
One of my advisers in undergraduate days, an archconservative who nonetheless found much to praise in FDR, referenced Solzhenitsyn and the beginning of Gulag Archipelago to us, conjuring up the core terror of "You're under arrest!"
It wasn't until well after a decade in graduate school that I finally pulled Gulag down off my shelves, waiting silently, almost reproachingly for years, to begin reading.
It is a traumatizing work, not just for the author, but his audience. So bleak, despite its indictment of Leninism and Stalinism, that there is almost no exit from the decades of grinding misery and brutality of the archipelago. It staggers the mind how it is possible to survive mentally, to say nothing of physically, under such conditions. Let alone to feel capable of, to have the energy and mind for literary historiography, and remain strong enough to stand with a fierce moral backbone against the weight of a crushing system with the force of concrete and steel and unleashed moral bankruptcy by almost everyone around you.
What the Soviet system did to Aleksandr Isayevich, it almost doesn't compare to the self-punishing effort he put into writing as his vocation, deep into old, old age. That I admire as well.
Pearls of expression fall off nearly every page. That book spoke to me in ways I can't describe.
Thanks also to Aleksandr Isayevich, I have a fascination with gulag literature from all over Eastern Europe. I am constantly hunting for the keys that preserve sanity and hope in the face of total, depraved lawlessness - and sufficient power of conviction to prevent the collapse and warping of political order that enables such a gulag in the first place.
Rest in peace, Aleksandr Isayevich. You may have complained bitterly that the Western world does not have the moral fiber to stand up to any form of totalitarianism, but you should know that some of us have listened, and closely.
Solzhenitsyn
totalitarianism
Gulag Archipelago
