“How easy for me to live with You, O Lord! How easy for me to believe in You!” The believer Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn had every reason not to believe: poverty in childhood, the front lines in Hitler’s war, arrest, torture, imprisonment, hard labor, cancer, persecution, and humiliation. All these were the birth pains of his faith and the catalyst of his great literary works.
He was born on Dec. 11, 1918, in Northwest Russia, and was raised in the Russian Orthodox religion, a crime in the Soviet state. Government schooling and a science degree fashioned him into an atheist for a time, but only a time.
A gradual return to spiritual ways began during his trials in the Russian army and his arrest for slandering Stalin in a letter to a friend. The penalty was eight years in prison camps, virtually a death sentence by overwork and starvation.
The shadow—and the light—of these eight life-changing years fell upon his entire literary output. And although he wrote in a journalistic style he was, in truth, a poet and a prophet.
‘The Gulag Archipelago’
“The Gulag Archipelago,” his most important work, is a tale of cruelties inflicted on prisoners in the Soviet penal system. It is a masterpiece of reporting, but more significantly, it is a narrative of the struggle to come to terms with injustice and the desperate battle to stay alive.Much has been written about the effects of brutality on the prisoners, how they were turned into beasts, but the few who were not seem to be passed by unnoticed. One thinks of the many pine cones falling to the ground in a forest, and the few that germinate and grow into stately trees. “I am not going to examine those countless cases of evil here. They are well known to everyone,” Solzhenitsyn wrote.
He observed that one inmate, who ardently preached that camp life can only corrupt, was not himself corrupted. He wouldn’t betray his fellow prisoners for an extra piece of bread or a shorter sentence. This man disproved his own claim. Most incorruptible were the truly religious people, “their self-confident procession through the camp—a sort of silent religious procession with invisible candles.”
‘The First Circle’
After years of starvation, carrying bricks, and building walls, the author was transferred to another kind of prison. This jail inspired his next book. “The First Circle” describes the lives and thoughts of hapless intellectuals convicted of crimes against the State and forced to use their technical knowledge to develop technologies to spy on private citizens.‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’
If there were such a thing as lyric irony, it might be the tone of this short novel. Ivan Denisovich, a kindly, simple man, has been sentenced to a camp in the Soviet Gulag for being a spy. Although innocent, he faces 10 years of forced labor, building walls in brutal conditions where the cold often freezes the mortar before it can be applied to the bricks.Publication
“Throughout the years, not only was I convinced that I would never in my life see a line of mine in print, but I also did not dare read anything to even my closest friends,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. The political danger was too great.Exile in the West
After this initial victory, Russia’s political climate abruptly changed. The new Soviet government tried—and failed—to assassinate him. He was slandered in the press, jeered by a deceived public, arrested, imprisoned, and finally flown to an unknown destination. Without his foreknowledge, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled.Harvard Address in 1978
Life in the West, with its abundance and wide-ranging freedoms, was astonishing to a man who had lived 55 years in the Soviet Union. His 1978 commencement address at Harvard University was a warning to the American people of the dangers of materialism and legalizing immorality in the name of freedom.“I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary, but from a friend.” He saw that Americans had turned their backs on religion: “Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? A moral bankruptcy has weakened us. Society appears to have little defense against human decadence, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”
Return to Russia in 1994
After the collapse of communism, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, flying from Vermont to Alaska and then to Siberia. He landed at Magadan, the center of the Gulag, from which he began a two-month train trip across Russia, holding dozens of small and large public meetings. He arrived in Moscow on July 21, 1994, where he had been given 10 acres of land nearby to build a house and live in peace.Sometimes the conception, writing, and printing of his works covered decades. Because a written remark about the government could deliver him to prison or the firing squad, some of his works lived only in his mind and memory for years. Now that he was free, he completed earlier works and began writing short stories and memoirs. “The Oak and the Calf,” “Between Two Millstones,” and “Invisible Allies” relate his earlier struggles with the government, his life in exile, and the help of many kind, brave people who hid and smuggled manuscripts during difficult times.
He also continued his lifetime project “The Red Wheel,” which he first conceived of during the 1930s. It was intended to be a series of novels covering the years 1914 through 1922, but was left incomplete, ending with “March, 1917.” This epic series is a mixture of historical fact, autobiography, fiction, and philosophy—an overview in the manner of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—poet and prophet—led a stupendous life. “I look back in wonder,” he writes, “at the path which I alone could never have found, a wondrous path through despair to this point from which I, too, could transmit to mankind a reflection of Your rays.”
