Solzhenitsyn RIP

I learned of Alexander Sozhenitsyn's death only Tuesday. I use several news sources including NPR, but I'm not a news junkie. And Sozhenitsyn fell out of favor with the American elites when he clarified his motivation for exposing the lie that was Soviet Communism in The Gulag Archipelago and other works such as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This Nobel laureate was roundly booed by the graduating class at Harvard during his commencement address there when he warned the West that her forgetfulness of God was leading her in the direction of the tyranny that the Russian people had suffered under for 70 years.

For Solzhenitsyn was by the time of his exile to America a theist, a Christian theist, who had come to accept his grandparents' primitive belief that Russia was suffering under Communist oppression because they, the Russian people, had forgotten God. Like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn experienced conversion while in prison, and he blessed his chains, as it were, for bringing him the wisdom to grasp the truth about God.

If you are familiar with Dostoevski's The Brother's Karamazov, you will appreciate Sozhenitsyn's use (in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) of the names "Ivan" and "Alyosha." In both books, Ivan is the character lacking faith, Alyosha, the one having it.But Sozhenitsyn's Ivan is not a doctrinaire atheist, he is a much more humane and likeable character than Dostoevski's. This Ivan is almost American in his mild insistence that prayer may work for you, Alyosha, but not for me. So if you haven't read The Gulag Archipelago (And I've only read the first of its two large volumes.), don't try it first or second. Go instead for the short but powerful evocation of the gulag in his short novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Then there is Cancer Ward and other novels and works that may today be more important than the brutal history of the Gulag.