Remembering Solzhenitsyn
It must have been somewhere around 1972 when I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was a revelation and one of the most memorable books I have ever read. I started reading that afternoon and couldn’t stop until I was almost finished and my eyes couldn’t stay open. I read the ending the next evening. I felt I had just finished reading something important but I wasn’t sure why it meant so much. It was great literature to be sure but there was something more to it. Looking back, I think it was one of the first instances when I became aware of my Russian heritage and it made me feel closer to my grandfather, Sam, who I was just beginning to re-establish a relationship with.
Whatever it was, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov became an iconic figure for me. He was the ultimate survivor and at the end of a merciless day of backbreaking labor and little to eat, Shukhov was able to count his blessings and move on to the next day with his dignity intact. As Solzhenitsyn put it, “Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day.”
Solzhenitsyn was an confounding man. He is credited with being the one who opened the way to the end of the Soviet Union and Communism in Russia. He criticized the government from inside and outside Russia. In exile, he attacked those that expelled him but also those who took him in. In his now famous Harvard commencement speech he began by saying “truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”
He went on the attack: “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.”
He went on to denounce our legal system, the media and our permissive society in general. It seemed to many at the time like the dog biting the hand that feeds it, but there was much to be said and considered about his words, especially today. “Should one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
He ended his speech by saying “If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”
The longer he was away from Russia, the more reclusive and entrenched he became. I was disappointed to read of his anti-Semitic leanings later on and at some point he voice became irrelevant, at least to me. He went back to the homeland but never published any of great impact again in his life. He even became a TV star in Russia with his own talk show. The show tanked, apparently because he was boring every one stiff.
Still, if he had only written one book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it would have been enough to change the world.
