Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died the other day, and I’ve finally found a decently detailed obituary of the man. Solzhenitsyn is one of my favorite authors, although I have only read a few of his works besides The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag Archipelago is what really sparked my interest in the Soviet government and the Gulag in particular. It remains a classic in the historiography of the Soviet prison camp systems, and is considerably better (besides being better-written) than many of the more recent highly-acclaimed histories. One can even detect an undercurrent of jealousy in many authors who take Solzhenitsyn to task for minor errors or things that they portray as distortions; rarely have I seen a substantive criticism of The Gulag Archipelago. On the whole, the man wrote a remarkable history secretly, and without access to the records of the government — and his work has stood the test of time.
Solzhenitsyn, by writing the history of part of a totalitarian regime, found himself a political figure. A quote at the end of his obituary put it well: “His biographer, DM Thomas, compared the author to another returned exile, Lenin himself, imagining ‘Lenin and Solzhenitsyn, staring cold-eyed at each other across the corpse-filled gorge of the 20th century.’” It then points out that Solzhenitsyn was a gentle man, as though that were a counterpoint to that quote. In reality, staring down the cruel is the hallmark of a gentle man — a moral lesson that the decadent West that Solzhenitsyn criticized never fully recognized.
And that’s saying nothing about his other moral and religious thinking.
RIP Alexsandr Isayevich — may the Russian conscience live on through your works.