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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008ObituaryThe weight of the word of truth: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970. ‘During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. … In 1961 … I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’ These brief words from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s short biography for his Nobel Prize lecture in 1970 touch upon the turning point in his life when he risked publication. He had already spent eight years of his life in prisons of the Gulag (acronym in Russian for ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps’) for a thinly disguised slur on Stalin in a letter to a friend. The cost of careful words in a beautifully written novella about prison life could easily be higher than a casual phrase. It turned out that this and later publications, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, helped in the downfall of the Soviet regime. Such was the power of great art, serving truth at any cost. The Times newspaper later reflected, ‘The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union from the appearance of Gulag’. Decided to be a writerSolzhenitsyn was born in the period of the Russian Revolution, in 1918, three months after the death of his father in a hunting accident. His mother never remarried and struggled to provide her brilliant son with a cultured and orthodox Christian environment. They lived in Rostov-on-Don. Before his teens Solzhenitsyn had decided to become a great writer and was very widely read in the Russian classics such as War and Peace. In his teens he converted to Marxist Leninism and espoused the Soviet project. By the age of 18, in 1936, he had roughed out a grand novel about the momentous year 1918 — which many years later became realised as The Red Wheel, finished in 1993, and written from a Christian rather than idealistic Marxist perspective. Eight-year ‘mild’ sentenceIn June 1941 Hitler invaded and Solzhenitsyn enlisted. After serving in a Cossack regiment he transferred to training in artillery. He then participated in the counter-offensive which pushed back the Nazi army, and was decorated for gallantry. During these war years he worked on poems and short stories and wrote letters to family and friends — which led to his downfall. His oblique reference to Stalin resulted in those eight years in the Gulag — considered a mild sentence. Execution was often handed out for such a crime. He later saw incarceration as providential, as it was for John Bunyan and Fyodor Dostoyevsky — it marked his return to Christian faith and undeception about Marxism and the roots of the Soviet regime. In the Gulag he composed in his head and memorised the words. Sometimes he would write on stone walls, or on fragments of paper which he afterwards destroyed once the words were committed to memory. He remained optimistic throughout the ordeal, guided by his convictions, which would not allow him to go against his conscience. Particularly he saw the calling of the writer as one of holding to truth at any cost. The experience of imprisonment Ð his own and other zeks (prisoners) Ð was captured for his readers in his novels and the non-fictional The Gulag Archipelago. In his Noble Lecture in Literature, 1970, Solzhenitsyn said: ‘Those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force Ð they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.’ In a brief loosening of the regime’s grip, Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was published. After this respite, his work was only published abroad and clandestinely seeped back into the Socialist Republic. When the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1974, the Nobel prize winner was forcibly exiled, settling in Vermont, USA. There he astonished the complacent West by speaking out against its easy materialism, lack of conviction and moral corruption. He accused the West of being fatally weakened by a secular humanism that had its roots in the Enlightenment. In a famous speech at Harvard University on June 8 1978 he explained in terms which have a remarkable affinity with another ‘Jeremiah’, Francis Schaeffer: ‘I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the centre of all.’ Back from exileSolzhenitsyn was welcomed back from exile by Russia in 1994, the USSR having crumbled, and his works are now sold in bookshops throughout the nation, giving a tangible hope that the dark days of the Soviet regime, the casualties of which were apocalyptic in number, will not return. Solzhenitsyn reckoned, for instance, that the Gulag received a quarter of the population of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the dark years. It is uncomfortable having a prophet around — Solzhenitsyn once spoke of what happened in the USSR as ‘mankind’s tomorrow’. This makes it all the more important to all of us that his books are still read, now that death has silenced him. In his final interview, last year, he was asked about his Christian faith and death: ‘For me faith is the foundation and support of one’s life. … I feel (death) is a natural, but by no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.’ Colin Duriez,
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