RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Etienne]

I'm going to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in his memory now.:(

[quasimodo1]

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Love is blind, the saying goes, and if so, it signifies

her instinct for self-preservation. Clear-sighted love

does not always conjure up an immediate response.

Time and distance may be - and have been -

necessary for a true appreciation of the depth and

warmth of perceptive feeling. This has not been so

in Solzhenitsyn's case. When his novel, One Day in

the Life of Ivan Denisovich, first appeared eight

years ago, it was recognised at once in his own

country, and soon all over the world, that a major

new writer had entered the arena. As Pravda wrote,

'Solzhenitsyn's narrative is reminiscent at times of

Tolstoy's artistic force. An unusually talented author

has been added to our literature!' It would also be

difficult to outdo Pravda's exposé of the power

exercised by Solzhenitsyn's narrative art: 'Why is it

that our heart contracts with pain as we read this

remarkable story at the same time as we feel our

spirits soar? The explanation lies in its profound

humanity, in the quality of mankind even in the

hour of degradation.'" ---- The Nobel Prize in

Literature 1970
Presentation Speech
Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the

Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1970

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/aleksandr_solzhenitsyn/index.html

[byquist]

Sad to hear that this prophet-like man is no longer here.

[Virgil]

Oh I just paid my respects to the man in the thread with the poll. I've never read his work, but he stands as a great man to me. I will participate in the read.

[kiz_paws]

The world has truly lost a great man. :(

Rest in peace, your work is done now.

Your fan,
K♥zzo

[johann cruyff]

I can't believe I'm only hearing about this now...:(

A great man, R.I.P.

[hellsapoppin]

I enjoyed his great books and will never forget all the controversy behind his criticism of the Soviet system and how they brutalized him.

A modern day Slavophile, he revered Russia like no other.

[stlukesguild]

An intriguing essay by Solzhenitsyn at Harvard:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

There is much food for thought here.

[Alyoshka]

Reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich learned me more about the life in the Soviet labor camps than a history lesson ever could have. You really get the feeling you are there watching the prisoners, and the way both the brutality and the fellowship in the camps is described is just brilliant!

[Jozanny]

An intriguing essay by Solzhenitsyn at Harvard:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

There is much food for thought here.

Yes indeed, and we can't really discuss it in the forum but man was Solzhenitsyn ahead of the curve here. The pundits discussed the controversy surrounding this speech last night. Thanks for the url luke. I cannot finish it now because I need a nap, but this is visionary.

[Erichtho]

I have only read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the novella Matryona's Place. Maybe it is time to read more by him now. :)

[curlyqlink]

I attempted to read Solzhenitsyn once, found him to be all but unreadable-- a long, bitter polemic against Stalin and his prison camps. He was the darling of the media briefly, until he condemned American materialism as bitterly as he condemned Soviet communism.

The man's death is sad, just as it is sad when anyone dies. But his reputation as a great man, as a great writer, is in my opinion vastly overblown. He was more than a bit of a crank, living in seclusion on his Vermont farm, angry at the world in all its manifestations. What he was against was plain; what he was for remained obscure. The good old days of the Tsar and Holy Mother Church, perhaps. His politics was appalling, what with his belief that the U.S. should have stayed in Vietnam until victory was gained by damn, and his objections to what he chose to see as the excessive freedoms of life in America.

Bad ideas and a bad writer; I only wish the poor man had been happier.

[hellsapoppin]

"The good old days of the Tsar and Holy Mother Church, perhaps"


Yours is a good description of an old style slavophile - precisely what the highly anachronistic Solzhenitsyn was.

[Etienne]

Unreadable? One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is a great book, what exactly are your literary tastes may I ask, and what work by him have you (attempted to) read? I'm not sure he was only a pessimist and had nothing to stand for, only against. I am far from being very knowledgeable about him, but what you say does not strike me as very much accurate, although not completely false. But keep in mind that (beside his writing skills) I am saying this under all reserve...

[quasimodo1]

"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of fiction and history written in the 20th century, died late Sunday in Russia, his son Yermolai said early Monday in Moscow. He said the cause was a heart condition. He was 89." Today, NYT

[quasimodo1]

"Religion always remains higher than everyday life.

In order to make the elevation towards religion

easier for people, religion must be able to alter its

forms in relation to the consciousness of modern

man."

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by

the intrusion of force. This is not merely

interference with freedom of the press but the

sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its

memory."

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that

we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the

easiest and most comfortable course for us is to

seek insight where it accords with our emotions -

especially selfish ones."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[stlukesguild]

I attempted to read Solzhenitsyn once, found him to be all but unreadable-- a long, bitter polemic against Stalin and his prison camps. He was the darling of the media briefly, until he condemned American materialism as bitterly as he condemned Soviet communism.

The man's death is sad, just as it is sad when anyone dies. But his reputation as a great man, as a great writer, is in my opinion vastly overblown. He was more than a bit of a crank, living in seclusion on his Vermont farm, angry at the world in all its manifestations. What he was against was plain; what he was for remained obscure. The good old days of the Tsar and Holy Mother Church, perhaps. His politics was appalling, what with his belief that the U.S. should have stayed in Vietnam until victory was gained by damn, and his objections to what he chose to see as the excessive freedoms of life in America.

Bad ideas and a bad writer; I only wish the poor man had been happier.

You repeatedly declare Solzhenitsyn to be a "bad writer" and yet offer nothing but criticisms of his politics. It would seem that these unnerve or discomfort you far more than his artistic ability. Personally, I'd probably make sure I used proper verb tense etc... if I were out writing about how bad another author is. Like Etienne I have not read enough by Solzhenitsyn to make a final decision as to his merits. I have read his speech from the 1978 Harvard graduation, and I concur that he comes out against both Marxism/Communism/Stalinism and American/Western Materialism. As Jozy suggested, much that he puts forth in this speech is truly ahead of the curve. American materialism is not the ideal standard by which all civilizations should be measured. There are problems when anything is taken to the extreme: when what is legal trumps what is right or wrong. There are problems with a culture of relativism that believes that there is no right or wrong... or good or evil. There is an apparent lack of courage in a nation or a civilization when it can only stand up for human rights against nations that are weak or impotent to retaliate. Solzhenitsyn catches flack because he does not rush blindly into the arms of American/Western culture after rejecting the political conditions of the Soviet Union. He realizes that neither system is perfect, and offers a wake-up call that is passionate... and well-written.

[stlukesguild]

"People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities...

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights..."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978

[stlukesguild]

"The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom... But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

...the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/04/world/0804-SOLZHENITSYN_index.html Photos of Aleksandr Solzhenitisyn

[EricP]

I wouldn't exactly call Solzhenitisyn a hero, as some in this thread are. He did suffer greatly at the hands of Soviet totalitarianism, but he wasn't an advocate of democracy. He was a monarchist. In fact, he opposed democracy in Russia and was a supporter of the Spanish Fascist government of General Franco. He also opposed the human rights watchdog organization Amnesty International and supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The enemy of one's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.

[Leabhar]

I wouldn't exactly call Solzhenitisyn a hero, as some in this thread are. He did suffer greatly at the hands of Soviet totalitarianism, but he wasn't an advocate of democracy. He was a monarchist. In fact, he opposed democracy in Russia and was a supporter of the Spanish Fascist government of General Franco. He also opposed the human rights watchdog organization Amnesty International and supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The enemy of one's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.

Not to get deep into politics here, but this all doesn't really matter if you're not one of those people who have a tiny view of the world and can't even look outside of the box. Also if you unabashedly support the American government in everything, which is very ridiculous. Also, any human rights organization is a complete joke if it can't even stop thought crime in Europe. Solzhenitsyn was anti-Western and anti-Communist. All good in my opinion.

I'm going to start reading Solzhenitsyn soon.

[EricP]

Not to get deep into politics here, but this all doesn't really matter if you're not one of those people who have a tiny view of the world and can't even look outside of the box. Also if you unabashedly support the American government in everything, which is very ridiculous. Also, any human rights organization is a complete joke if it can't even stop thought crime in Europe. Solzhenitsyn was anti-Western and anti-Communist. All good in my opinion.

I'm going to start reading Solzhenitsyn soon.

Why do you assume that I have "a tiny view of the world and can't even look outside the box"? I've lived in the former Soviet Union and I do not "unabashedly support the American government in everything". I attended dozens of large anti-war rallies in opposition to the Iraq war, just to name one example of my disagreement with some U.S. policies.

What exactly do you mean by saying that being "anti-Western" is good? That seems like a simplistic overgeneralization. Isn't unabashedly condemning the West and/or America just as narrow-minded as uncritically supporting it? Also, what exactly are the "thought crimes" you're referring to?

Looking solely at his politics, I'm not sure how anyone can defend an anti-Semite who supported the Fascist government in Spain.

[Leabhar]

Why do you assume that I have "a tiny view of the world and can't even look outside the box"? I've lived in the former Soviet Union and I do not "unabashedly support the American government in everything". I attended dozens of large anti-war rallies in opposition to the Iraq war, just to name one example of my disagreement with some U.S. policies.

First of all, I didn't accuse you of being like this, I said anyone who doesn't like Solzhenitsyn because he was anti-Western is like that.


What exactly do you mean by saying that being "anti-Western" is good? That seems like a simplistic overgeneralization. Isn't unabashedly condemning the West and/or America just as narrow-minded as uncritically supporting it? Also, what exactly are the "thought crimes" you're referring to?

Solzhenitsyn was good in that he critiqued everything, Western and soviet. Thought crime, as in historians being in prison for researching touchy historical topics.


Looking solely at his politics, I'm not sure how anyone can defend an anti-Semite who supported the Fascist government in Spain.

You're posts make you sound narrow minded. I don't care if you've lived on the moon if you're politically ignorant. As if someone can't defend a good writer because he wrote a book about Jews in the Soviet Union. Same as claiming a book about Irish in the United Kingdom is anti-Irish. Its narrow minded. The Franco government of Spain (which was not even Fascist, btw, that's a big historical misconception) was Christian and anti-Communist, which is the reason Solzhenitsyn liked it.

[stlukesguild]

If Solzhenitsyn was antisemitic... I would condemn him for this. If he was in support of Franco's regime, I would disagree with him on that concern. None of this, however, serves to convince us that he was a poor writer nor that he was well ahead of the curve in recognizing many problems on both side of the East/West divide. I disagree vehemently with much that Plato has to say... but have no doubt that he is a brilliant thinker and writer. There were endless intellectuals... artists, poets, writers, musicians... who were wholly against Franco... but failed to recognize or admit to the equal... and far greater... evils of Stalinism. The fact that the man (or anyone) was wrong about some things in no way negates where he was right.

[Etienne]

Well I would like to see quotes or credible sources on is support for Franco, or any other such claim, and what kind of support that might have been. For example, many early day communists were afterward deluded by what they supported, what exactly was his basis for support of Franco, that's what I would like to know. As often things are not so easy as fitting someone in a word or two, and Solzhenitsyn certainly fit a simple label as: Franco supporter without much explanations. I'm thinking notably of Dali who's support of Franco doesn't fit the simple label of: Dali was a fascist. Also do I have to remind anyone of American, and notable Nixon's support of Franco? etc. etc.

But that being said, I am not saying you are necessarily wrong, I just don't think matters are that simple as you might seem to indicate.

Also nothing changes the fact that he was a great artist.

[olichka]

I'm sure everyone here has heard of the passing of Alexander Soljhenitsyn, a great Russian writer and dissident and author of " The Gulag Archipelago " and " One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch " on Aug.4, 2008. Perhaps we can discuss him here ?


I have only read those 2 books by him and they were quite shocking in their portrayal of punitive labour camps.


In particular, I'd like to hear from Atheist and Bazarov, since they're so knowledgeable about the Russian history.