Solzhenitsyn: Witness, prophet
Alexander Solzhenitsyn will be a witness throughout the ages to the horror of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union. A simple short novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," memorized line by line when he was a prisoner in a labor camp and written after he was released, shook the Evil Empire to its foundations.
A monumental literary testimony, "The Gulug Archipelago," followed and cast a dazzling light into the terrible darkness where the victims of Stalin and his dictatorial successors suffered in soul-searing squalor.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn can be compared to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as a chronicler of the turbulent history and the innermost secrets of an enigmatic country. He was a prophetic figure who hoped he could influence the Russian people into returning to the moral principles that guided his own nationalism.
He viewed the near century that his life encompassed with distaste, as he made clear when he gave his now famous speech at Harvard denouncing the decline of the West.
He reviled modern America, yet lived happily for his 18 years of exile from Russia in Cavendish, Vermont, where he was liked and protected by the local people, to whom he expressed his appreciation warmly and sincerely. His wife and three sons all live in the United States.
In a touching turn of phrase when announcing his death in Moscow yesterday, his widow Nataly said that he lived "a difficult, but happy life."
Understandably, his difficult life made him a difficult man and his later writing became difficult to digest. But there can be no doubt about the lasting impact of the labor camp writings that earned him the Nobel Prize.
He wrote in "The Gulag Archipelago": "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."
The warning is as valid today as when it was written four decades ago.
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