Solzhenitsyn - Dead at 89

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will always be one of my heroes. His book, The Oak and the Calf, moved me so deeply that it remains one of the few books I have ever begun rereading immediately upon finishing it. The book is an early memoir of his head-butting with the Soviet establishment. It's a riveting account of a man's personal courage and fortitude against unbelievable odds. A short biographical sketch of Solzhenitsyn can be found here.

I like what William F. Buckley, Jr. said of Solzhenitsyn,“Such is the debt of free spirits to Solzhenitsyn that we owe it to him at least to consider anything he asks us to consider.” That certainly goes for his famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, "A World Split Apart," a speech which occasioned enormous controversy.To me, Solzhenitsyn represented a prophetic voice, a view from "outside" with which we as Americans needed to wrestle.(Update 8/5/08 - Read Charles Colson's reflections on Solzhenitsyn's address - very useful and insightful!)

I see that National Review Online has provided a link to Jay Nordlinger's reflections delivered on the 25th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's address. It is very much worth a read. He called the speech "more relevant than ever."

Additions to the above:

- Victor Davis Hanson says, "In the end, his epitaph is that no one in the 20th-century did more than he to bring down an horrific and bloodthirsty system that sought at any price to destroy the free mind and all that it entails."

- NRO editorialized well:�

When 1999 turned into 2000, a lot of people asked, “Who was the Man of the Century?” And many answered, “Solzhenitsyn.” That was a very solid choice.

Born in 1918, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn became the voice and conscience of the Russian people. There was no greater or more effective foe of Communism, or of totalitarianism in general. His Gulag Archipelago was a crushing blow to the Soviet Union — after its publication in the mid-1970s, the USSR had no standing, morally. The book was effective because it was true. (more. . .)

- From Nordlinger's speech, mentioned above, a few excerpts:

And consider, for a moment, one of the most famous passages of the speech. Some people here may know it by heart: “The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.” I pause over that phrase “the human soul longs for things higher . . .”: It reminds me that Allan Bloom’s surprise bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, was originally entitled “Souls Without Longing” — at least that’s what Bloom wanted to call it. And, aside from that marvelous phrase “TV stupor,” how about “intolerable music”? This criticism was much remarked on after the speech. And the most remarked-on portion of Allan Bloom’s book would be his excoriation of contemporary pop music. The subject touches a nerve, obviously.

Cognoscenti may expect a National Review hand to say this, but Solzhenitsyn, in his speech, sounds, to me, very much like Whittaker Chambers. At the core of Chambers’s life and thought was the question, “God or man?” It was that stark: Would we have a God-centered world or a man-centered one? Solzhenitsyn puts the same question. For that matter, so does Paul — who, in the words of his King James translators, asks whether we will serve “the creature” or “the Creator.”

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… As Sidney Hook put it — in a typically powerful essay called “On Western Freedom” — “Rarely in modern times . . . has one man’s voice provoked the Western world to an experience of profound soul-searching.” The speech was scrutinized a thousand different ways, from a thousand different angles.

Let it be remembered, however, that Solzhenitsyn never much cared what his critics said. Frankly, he never much cared what his admirers said. It was fine that he was immune to criticism, but it was probably finer that he was — to use Book of Common Prayer language — “immune to praise.” For a piece I did two years ago, Ignat told me that his father never read a single word that his critics penned, except in one instance, when he answered them in one fell swoop. As Ignat put it, “He could have written The Red Wheel or kept up with his critics — but not both.” He almost never did anything to defend himself, or explain himself, or elaborate a little. Maybe he should have. But he got a lot of work done, didn’t he?