Without equivocation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the greatest Russian author of all time, even greater than the great Dostoyevsky, surpassing by orders of magnitude the likes of Tolstoy; he is perhaps the greatest author of all time…this is no trifling estimation.
I first encountered his classic novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was in my late teens, just a little book that could be read in an afternoon, but it was heavy and it was deep.
I read it slowly, forming every word in my mouth, pushing them out with my breath…quietly, nearly silently; reading aloud to facilitate my understanding of the text.
In my early twenties I was heavily engaged with reading in the Russian cannon; it took some time for me to get to Solzhenitsyn’s other writing, like the Gulag Archipelago for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but when I came to it, I found it life changing.
Solzhenitsyn said the Archipelago was more of an exercise in journalism than literature; though he should not have been, he was surprised by how well it was received. He personalized the gulag experience which he was able to do because he himself had been a victim of it…and survived.
He put a human face on the collected suffering imposed by the Soviet state on its citizens by exposing to the world the systematic injustice of the gulag system, into which more than twenty million Russians disappeared, the threat of which still hung over everyone…even today.
Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia, in 1918 just after the Bolshevik Revolution. He served in the Russian Army during World War II. In 1944 he was decorated for valor in combat and Awarded the Order of the Red Star, but in 1945 he was arrested for saying derogatory things about the government in private correspondence, in statements that he did not publish, that were merely sentiments that were shared between himself and a friend…he spent eight years in the gulags after his conviction.
Surviving World War II and the Russian gulags are themselves heroic feats, feats for which any person is deserving of recognition. His status as a Nobel Laureate marks him as a person of significance as well; but, what makes Solzhenitsyn a hero to me is his insight into human nature and his profound ability to communicate that insight through the poetry of prose.
In my early thirties I read more of his books: October 1914 and The First Circle. I was awed by the way in which he could present the myriad-forces that vector-in on the complex matrix of concerns: societal, intellectual, spiritual and emotional, which comprise the motivations and shapes the intentions of individual persons…of all people, everywhere.
Solzhenitsyn
was able to portray the movement of those currents, their shifting valence in
the matrix, in a way that made the lives of his characters…even the most
ordinary, crackle with a dynamism that transforms them into living-spirits, he
is able to make the even the most heinous and cruel, like Stalin, appear to the
reader as worthy subjects of our compassion; accomplishing such feats of
noblesse because he was adept at humanizing the characters who took life from
his pen, by this he allowed his readers to expand their own view of the world…to
include his own; and in doing we are made into better persons.
I am a better person for having read him.
Sid
Gateaux, Big Sugar, Peoples History, Zen Syndicate, Essay, Reflection, Hero, Alexander Solzhenitsyn