One of my heroes. He died Sunday at the age of 89. It’s actually pretty amazing he lived as long as he did, since he developed cancer while he was in a Soviet concentration camp and received very poor treatment for it, for several years.
I read his first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, either when I was in high school, or shortly after I got to college. And I read The First Circle a year of two after I got out of college. As well as the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago shortly after that.
I re-read One Day in the Life… about seven years ago. It’s a relatively short book which everyone should read.
Solzenhitsyn got himself in trouble with Smersh, the Russian spy organization in 1945. He’d served as an artillery officer, but wrote a letter disparaging Stalin and referring to him as “the man with the moustache.” That got him eight years in a labor camp.
Here’s the Washington Post obituary:
Nobel Winner Chronicled Tyranny of Soviet Union – washingtonpost.com
Like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th century masters of Russian letters, his subject was considered to be the struggle between good and evil in the Russian soul. The line separating the two, he said, ran through every heart.
His text was the nightmare of Marxism-Leninism, and he exposed its flaws in ways from which it never recovered. The task he set for himself was no less than restoring to the Russian people the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent years of communism that had been kept from them by their leaders.
In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and “The Gulag Archipelago,” his acknowledged masterpieces, and a vast outpouring of other works, he chronicled the sufferings of his countrymen and bore lasting witness to the fate of millions of otherwise forgotten victims of Soviet misrule. Literature, he declared in his Nobel lecture, “is the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation’s bygone history.
“But woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force.”
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Solzhenitsyn struggled against the Soviet leadership almost in the shadow of the Kremlin. In 1974, he was charged with treason and exiled to the West …
And the NY Times:
Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com
Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”
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