“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”
Amy and Rurik emailed me last night to tell me that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had died last night. Amy knows how much I loved to read Solzhenitsyn. I first read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich“, his first book, years ago and everything I could get my hands on after that.
To my generation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a hero of immense stature. He spent 1945 to 1953 in the Stalinist gulags for writing a single letter that criticized Stalin while he was an artillery officer and hero in the Red Guard. After his release, he continued writing without publishing until Krushev denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality”. When he lost favor with the Soviets, he was forcibly retired but his manuscripts continued to be smuggled to the West. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Twenty years later he returned to Russia.
His place in world history and literature is secure. I hope he finds the rest he so desperately deserves. Rurik writes more at Eagles Up! Talon.
I urge everyone to read “One Day…” It’s a short read, but it’ll change your life.
Category: Historical
While in Gruaduate School, I had the opportunity for a course devoted solely to Solzhenitsyn and his writing. Later I wrote one of my Masters papers on an examination of his critique of socialism. This led to one of my first “dissident moments” since the senior professor for whom I had begun the project had been driven out of that univeristy, and his replacement refused even to look at a paper on such a horrid subject. Eventually I received credit when the former professor agreed to receive my work at his new location. A second paper, on Evgenii Zamyatin, the author of “We” and a writer much admired by Solzhenitsyn himself, got a similar reception, again on political grounds. Such experiences help explain why I am not a professor.
I leave you with an aphorism form “Cancer Ward” – “If you remember your collar size, you will forget something else truly important.”
Long before the likes of Oriana Fallaci and Mark Steyn began addressing the decline of Western civilization, Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed this subject in a speech he delivered to Harvard University in 1978 titled “A World Split Apart”. In many respects, the speech is even more relevant today than it was thirty years ago.
Here’s an excerpt on the decline of courage and loss of willpower in the West:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days…Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society…
Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal…
Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development…The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever…”
You can read “A World Split Apart” in its entirety here:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm
Don’t forget “The Gulag Archipelago,” or at least Volume I. Utterly and beautifully terrifying. I bought a copy at a yard sale when I was 19, home from Korea on leave. Reading it didn’t make my mission there any less dull but it certainly reinforced its importance.