A prophet is not without honor save in his own house, reads the Bible. The world lost one of its great prophets on Sunday. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, political prisoner, exile, Russian patriot, and World War II veteran, died of heart failure Sunday at 89. He did more to expose the evil nature of the Soviet regime than any other human being and foretold the day when Russia would transcend Communism. Standing on the right side of history but the wrong side of power, Solzhenitsyn is one of the few great men of the 20th Century who was also a good man.
Has there ever been a more stark juxtaposition of courage and cowardice than Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and the Western political leaders who shunned him out of fear of alienating his Soviet persecutors? Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, but his greatest honor came four years later when the Soviet Union stripped him of his citizenship and deported him. Indeed, it wasn't until he left the Soviet Union that the novelist received the prestigious prize. When he attempted to receive it at the Swedish embassy in Moscow in 1970, the Swedish government balked out of fear of offending the Soviet Union. Much of the same accounts for Gerald Ford's cowardly refusal to meet with the exiled sage once he migrated to America.
Solzhenitsyn included the West in his criticism once he relocated to Vermont. "If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts I would have concentrated on the East's calamities," he told graduating Harvard students in 1978. "But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West in our days, such as I see them." Therein, Solzhenitsyn set his sights on the overly legalistic nature of the West, the mob thinking prevalent, its decadence, and the cowardice of its political leaders. The same leftists who utter platitudes about "speaking truth to power" harbored utter contempt for Solzhenitsyn, a man who actually spoke truth to power by writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipeligo, experiencing the Gulag after criticizing Stalin, and feeling the sting of the Western intelligensia by challenging rather than flattering their crude prejudices. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, rest in peace.
Solzhenitsyn's harvard address is fantastic. He may have been too pessimistic about US culture, its good sides not being as in-your-face as its bad sides. But he hits the nail on the head here:
"After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music."
The US is currently concerned with exporting a simplistic model of its own government and is actually exporting a lot of low culture like McDonald's and cable TV. We should remember the current spiritual poverty of our own culture and the need to renew our spirit if we are to do any good for the world. Solzhenitsyn reminds us of this beautifully in this address. All conservatives should read it (critically), imo.
