E-mail
Print
RSS
G-bookmarks
Live
TechnoratiIn 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In his undelivered acceptance speech, leaked to the world by friends, Solzhenitsyn defined the role of the author or artist as that of truth-teller against lies. The responsibility of the courageous author, he argued, "is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions." The Nobel committee cited his "ethical force" as the power of his literary achievement.
Nevertheless, when Khrushchev was toppled by Kremlin hardliners in 1964, the opening in the culture quickly closed. From this point onward, Solzhenitsyn was under constant threat and his writings were banned within the Soviet Union. In 1973, Solzhenitsyn allowed the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The massive work had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union, but the KGB, the Soviet spy service, was closing in. Solzhenitsyn's typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, hung herself shortly after her interrogation by the KGB. Solzhenitsyn then unleashed the work, which was quickly published around the world.
The Gulag Archipelago is a work of non-fiction, revealing the massive and murderous nature of the Soviet regime. The work could not be refuted. Soviet propagandists attempted to label Solzhenitsyn a "traitor" to the Soviet Union - a move that only served to demonstrate the veracity of Solzhenitsyn's central claims. The Soviet Union was embarrassed before the watching world, but Soviet authorities had reached the breaking point and Solzhenitsyn was expelled in 1974, soon followed by his wife and three sons.
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."
American diplomat George Kennan, himself one of the chief architects of American policy during the Cold War, would describe The Gulag Archipelago as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times." The Times of London went so far as to speculate, "The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union from the appearance of Gulag."
Solzhenitsyn would outlive the Soviet Union by seventeen years. He died on Sunday of complications from heart disease at age 89. As he had declared when he was expelled from his homeland in 1974, he died on Russian soil.
He was a man of contradictions or, as Joseph Pearce argues, a man of paradox. In any event, he was a man of great moral vision who revealed the brutality of the Soviet regime and contributed greatly to its collapse. Edward E. Erickson, who wrote two major works on Solzhenitsyn, argues that the key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is Christianity - the Russian Orthodox faith that framed Solzhenitsyn's worldview. Erickson argued that "in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs."
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn railed against the secularism and spiritual weakness of the West, even as he took refuge in Cavendish, Vermont for the years of his exile. In his famous 1978 Harvard University commencement address, "A World Split Apart," Solzhenitsyn pointed to the moral and spiritual crisis in the West. He declared that America's experiment with democracy was being undermined by secularism: Continue »
