Hero of a Dark Century

WITH the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the world has lost one of the great souls of this or any age. His story was beyond improbable: A former prisoner or “zek” in the vast system of Soviet prisons and labor camps who had also miraculously survived a bout with abdominal cancer, an “underground writer” who never expected a single word of his to be published in his own lifetime, Solzhenitsyn was catapulted to world fame with the November 1962 publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Nikita Khrushchev, the most “humane” of Soviet leaders, mistook Solzhenitsyn for a Soviet loyalist whose movingly understated account of a single day in the life of a simple peasant unjustly incarcerated in a Soviet labor camp would be useful to his own efforts at “de-Stalinization.” Khrushchev, who never completely lost touch with his own peasant roots, was undoubtedly also genuinely moved by this powerful testament to the human spirit. The soon-to-be-deposed Soviet leader may have been the first to misunderstand and underestimate Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the grand 19th-century Russian literary tradition who was supremely confident in the power of literature, rooted in truth and the best ethical traditions of Russia and the West, to defeat violence and lies, the twin pillars of 20th-century totalitarianism. And he was right. The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume “experiment in literary investigation,” as he suggestively subtitled that remarkable work, did more than any other piece of writing or political act in the 20th century to delegitimize the entire Communist enterprise.

JM

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J. Mahoney

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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WITH the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the world has lost one of the great souls of this or any age. His story was beyond improbable: A former prisoner or “zek” in the vast system of Soviet prisons and labor camps who had also miraculously survived a bout with abdominal cancer, an “underground writer” who never expected a single word of his to be published in his own lifetime, Solzhenitsyn was catapulted to world fame with the November 1962 publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Nikita Khrushchev, the most “humane” of Soviet leaders, mistook Solzhenitsyn for a Soviet loyalist whose movingly understated account of a single day in the life of a simple peasant unjustly incarcerated in a Soviet labor camp would be useful to his own efforts at “de-Stalinization.” Khrushchev, who never completely lost touch with his own peasant roots, was undoubtedly also genuinely moved by this powerful testament to the human spirit. The soon-to-be-deposed Soviet leader may have been the first to misunderstand and underestimate Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the grand 19th-century Russian literary tradition who was supremely confident in the power of literature, rooted in truth and the best ethical traditions of Russia and the West, to defeat violence and lies, the twin pillars of 20th-century totalitarianism. And he was right. The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume “experiment in literary investigation,” as he suggestively subtitled that remarkable work, did more than any other piece of writing or political act in the 20th century to delegitimize the entire Communist enterprise.