Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Author, Nobel Laureate, Hero

I will say without equivocation that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the greatest Russian author of all time, even greater than the great Dostoyevsky, surpassing by orders of magnitude the likes of Tolstoy; he is perhaps the greatest author of all time…and this is no trifling estimation.

I first encountered his classic novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was in my late teens, just a little book that could be read in an afternoon, but it was heavy and it was deep.

I read it slowly, forming every word in my mouth, pushing them out with my breath…quietly, nearly silently. I read it aloud to facilitate my understanding.

In my early twenties I was still heavily involved with reading other authors in the Russian cannon. It took some time for me to get to Solzhenitsyn’s other writing, like the Gulag Archipelago for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but when I came to it, I found it life changing.

Solzhenitsyn said the Archipelago was more of an exercise in journalism than literature; he was surprised by how well it was received, though he should not have been. Its principal achievement was the personalization of the gulag experience which he was able to do because he himself had been a victim of it.

He put a human face on the collected suffering imposed by the Soviet state on all of its citizens by exposing to the world the systematic injustice of the gulag system, and the threat of it which hung over everyone (and still does today).

Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia, in 1918, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. He served in the Russian Army during World War II. In 1944 he was decorated for valor in combat and Awarded the Order of the Red Star, but in 1945 he was arrested for saying derogatory things about the government in private correspondence. These were statements that he did not publish but were merely shared between himself and a friend.

He spent eight years in the gulags after his conviction.

Surviving World War II and the Russian gulags are themselves heroic feats, feats for which any person is deserving of recognition. His status as a Nobel Laureate is another thing that marks him as a person of significance. But…what makes Solzhenitsyn a hero to me is his insight into human nature and his profound ability to communicate that insight through the poetry of prose.

In my early thirties I read more of his books: October 1914 and The First Circle. I was awed by the way in which he could present the myriad forces: societal, intellectual, spiritual and emotional that vector-in on the complex matrix of concerns that comprises the motivations and shapes the intentions of individual persons.

Solzhenitsyn was able to portray the movement of those currents and shifting vectors in the matrix, in a way that made the lives of his characters…even the most ordinary, crackle with a dynamism that transforms them into living spirits, even the most heinous and cruel appear as worthy subjects of our compassion. He was able to accomplish such feats because he was adept at humanizing the characters in his novels, allowing his readers to expand their own view of the world…to include his own; in doing so his readers are made into better persons for having read him.