Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008): Requiescat in pace

What an enormously courageous and prophetically-astute witness Solzhenitsyn has been to those with ears to hear. Appropriately, tributes are appearing all over the place to honour his life and work. He passed away today at the age of 89:

The obituary in the Chicago Tribune reads: MOSCOW (AP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, died Sunday. He was 89.

His son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, said his father died of heart failure.

Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile but international renown and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing the human “meat grinder” that had caught him and millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

Here’s some excerpts from his works:

‘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. It is for this reason, and not because of the ‘weakness of indoctrinational work,’ that they are growing up ‘indifferent.’ Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity’. – The Gulag Archipelago, 1973

‘Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold and an empty belly, the zek longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in time of drought. He could knock it back in a single gulp. For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him’. – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written 1959, published 1962

‘He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and … he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul – today, maybe, they haven’t snitched any’. – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962

‘And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut …’. – The Gulag Archipelago, 1973

‘On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13. Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote ‘Wing 13′ on his admission card. They should have had the ingenuity to assign number 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department’. – Cancer Ward, 1968

‘Sending ‘Gulag’ would be a rash, a very risky, business, but opportunities were few … Right, I would send it. The heart had surfaced from one anxiety only to plunge into another … Two novels of mine appearing simultaneously in the West? A double? I felt like the Hawaiian surf riders described by Jack London, standing upright on a smooth board … on the crest of the ninth wave …’. – The Oak and the Calf, 1980

‘Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it…All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs’. – Testimony to the U.S. Congress, July 8 1975.

And in speech delivered at Harvard in June 8, 1978, he described the problems of both East and West as ‘a disaster’ rooted in agnosticism and atheism. They are ‘the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness … It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility’.

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