Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN died last week at the age of 89. One of the Soviet Union’s most vocal dissidents, he authored the epic 300,000-word Gulag Archipelago, which captured the terrible cruelty that he and fellow prisoners endured as inmates of Soviet prison camps.

After his 1974 expulsion from the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn fled to Europe and then the United States. Animated by a deeply spiritual and moral vision of the world, he was disappointed by the increasingly secular and commercial culture of the U.S. and in 1978, he gave a controversial commencement address at Harvard University in which he denounced both the East and West for their spiritual lacking. “We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.” (David Bromwich responded to this speech in “Solzhenitsyn and Freedom of the Press“)

In 1970, Dissent published two short letters from Solzhenitsyn—one sent to a group of students who had recently visited him; the other to the Writer’s Union in protest of his expulsion. Since then, we have published (and are now reposting) essays–including ones by Irving Howe, Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, and Roy Medvedev–that have grappled with the Russian writer’s provocative politics.

Here are the ones we have reposted:
Two Letters from Solzhenitsyn (November-December, 1970)
Irving Howe on Lukacs and Solzhenitsyn (November-December, 1971)
Roy Medvedev on Reading Gulag Archipelago (Spring 1976)
David Bromwich on Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Address (Fall 1978)
Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova: Solzhenitsyn, Prisoner of Chillon (Winter 1981)

Photo: Returning to Russia in 1994 (Evstafiev / Creative Commons)