Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89 was not only a great, but a passionately committed writer - he believed it was his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia's 20th-century experience for posterity.... Despite the ban imposed on all his works after the publication of his masterly A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), he was very widely read - in photocopied samizdat form - in his native Russia. He was also the only Russian writer to achieve the best-seller lists in the West, and sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages.
When you think about courage, about the willingness to tell the truth no matter what risks may present themselves, and about love of country, Alexander Sozhenitsyn should be at the top of your list. It's far too easy today to forget what a repressive, murderous regime the Soviet Union was. The risk Solzhenitsyn took by telling the truth as he saw it was substantial. At the height of the Cold War, which was when A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, the Soviet government neither brooked nor tolerated dissent. It was not uncommon for Russian dissidents to simply disappear, never to be heard from again. Solzhenitsyn was fortunate, in that he was merely expelled from his homeland, but he was never one to focus on his own plight, though the one request he did expess was to allowed to be able to die in his homeland. Given that Solzhenitsyn's rise in literary circle predated the Internet age, it was easy for him to recede into an ascetic existence in rural Vermont. Perhaps in another day and age, he would be been interviewed by every media outlet under the sun, but it seemed that more than anything, Solzhenitsyn just wanted to be left to his work. In the end, he became almost a Russian version of J.D. Salinger.
Solzhenitsyn's life spanned perhaps the most turbulent period of history known to mankind, and his passing is turning into a sadly subdued affair- which is probably how he wanted it. I can remember reading Solzhenitsyn's work in high school and college, trying to process the cruelty and repression based on my own limited frame of reference. That a government could be capable of treating it's citizens as the Soviet system does was something I struggled to wrap my head around...and yet there it was. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, and what he will be remembered for, is shining a light on evil and repression...and doing it in a way that spoke to ordinary people. To say that the voice of a towering literary voice has been silenced wouldn't begin to do justice to the contribution Alexander Solzhenitsyn made. The truly sad thing is that so few will recognize or remember this.
