Read 2 times, a very long yet chilling expansion on Denisovich
Give the democrats a chance and it will happen here.
Posted on 08/03/2008 2:40:29 PM PDT by the scotsman
'Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize winner for literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union and graphically portrayed life in Soviet labour camps, was dead at age 89, the news agency Interfax reported early Monday.
The agency quoted literary circles in the Russian capital.
The world famous writer and historian had not been seen in public for months. He died from the aftermath of a stroke, according to unconfirmed information.'
(Excerpt) Read more at monstersandcritics.com ...
A loss to us all>
I am going to watch with interest to see how Russia handles this.
Has Snopes debunked his writing yet?
Ping
One of the most remarkable figures of the 20th Century.
Solzhenytsin: right on the Communists, wrong on the Jews.
To all those still at sea.....
He tried to warn us but we knew better.
More’s the pity.
Anyone want a good idea of what life in the soviet union was really like, just read First Circle.
RIP
Are you implying Snopes is misguided in their stated quest? I find them pretty accurate.
It’s hard to find the right words to describe such a character. Most superlatives used in the attempt will seem insipid.
Before I read Solzhenitsyn, I was a typical addled-brained liberal. I forget which book of his I read first, likely “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. But after reading the Gulag, I realized that the reactionary conservatives were right about the Soviet Union and I and other “progressives’ were dead wrong. The man’s writings were a tremendous influence on my life. His impact on Russia and the world has been truly profound.
What horrible news. He was a remarkable man, a hero and an inspiration. RIP.
One of the great Russian novelists, a man who IMO deserves a place alongside Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev.
I remember being thrilled to talk to people in Cavendish, VT who had met him.
"Undetermined" is a key indicator.
why?
A great man — until he started hating America.
L
I have one of his very old books in my collection...First American edition I think...
“Cancer Ward”, was an eye opening depiction of Soviet health care.
May he rest in peace.
“You are under arrest.
Me? What for?
That’s what they all say....”
my dad was a Zek way before Solzhenitzn had a tour of the camps, he had many chances to speak with the author while he took refuge in VT but his comments were always: “What’s there to talk about.”
Long ago I read Gulag Archipelago and one of the things that always remained with me from the book is when he tells about sentences being handed out. They were taken one by one from a larger room into a smaller room and the first guy came back from the smaller room extremely distraught and tearful that he got 5 years, and then the next guy came back and was smiling and giggling like a fool and said he just got 20. Of course I can’t word it like he did but I always remembered that part.
Hmmm ~ didn’t know your family were from Ukraine.
A tragic loss. Farewell to the Dostoyevsky of the 20th Century.
RIP
Those of us in Vermont were happy to be his host while he was in exile.
I read the Gulag Archipelago (all 3 volumes)when it came out in the 70s. It was very tough reading but I knew this was one of those books which would define the 20th century.
What really incredible is that the Democrats are trying to make the U.S. a socialist country. They haven’t learned a thing from the collapse of the USSR. People like Obama think the federal government should take over all medical care. The Demo-Socialists think private enterprise is wrong. They want more decisions made inside the American Kremlin. They want less individual freedom of choice and more state control over our lives.
August 1914 and the Gulag Archipelago were masterpieces!
RIP
The man was a giant in the Cold War climate of the early 1970s.
I practically memorized a column in Reader’s Digest he wrote titled “Wake Up! Wake Up!”
Excellent.
If they could get away with it, I have little doubt they would try.
Why? What did snopes try to do?
His mission was a simple one ~ which I am sure he recognized from the first day he undertook to write anything ~ he did provide a memory of what it was like from the inside for the illumination of the successor nation that would arise out of the Communist wreckage.
No doubt he was flawed, as all prophets are flawed, but sometimes God must be satisfied with second or third best.
Not everyone who is called to the task is willing to accept the hardships that go along with it. And few would be that willing to restart after the loss of the first manuscripts.
So, what should any of us remember about this man? "One Day.....", "Cancer Ward....", "Gulag Archipelago",....etc. Those were the memories he was chosen to preserve. The smattering of meritless rantings as he descended into the senility that can encompass us all are meaningless.
IMHO, Solzhenitsyn didn’t hate America; he was too much of a humanitarian for that. But in his 1978 Harvard speech he expressed his frustration that most Americans didn’t understand the full horrid truth about the Gulag, the USSR, and communism. They vaguely knew they didn’t especially like any of those things, but Americans assumed (smugly in my view) that such could never happen here.
Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, yes.
But never here.
Solzhenitsyn tugged at the firebell rope until his arms grew tired. Then the earth moved, the Soviet Union dissolved, and he forsook his Vermont home-in-exile to return to his beloved “Rodina Mat’”.
I wonder what dear lovable Vladimir Putin really thinks about the former zek and immortal author.
Aleksandr Isayevich, tebye Bog blagoslovi!
He just saw Obama coming.
“The First Circle”, brilliant novel.
Unlike Little Dick Durbin, Solzhenitsyn really knew what a gulag was like. RIP, Aleksandr.
Obama is elated.
I became a conservative at the age of 21 after reading “The Gulag Archipelago.” He was the greatest author of our time.
RIP - I think he woke up a lot of people to the evil that was behind the Soviet power.
Snopes is a Leftist site run by Leftist activists who use their posturing as “authority” to further the Leftist Agenda.
They attempted to debunk the Clinton Body Count by linking a Bush Body Count in its place.
They publicly stated on their home page in March of ‘03 that they opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom.
They have gone to lengths to debunk and trivialize any acts of heroism or optimistic reports out of the combat theaters. And they realize it’s safe to take off the mask and dive into the tank for The One.
They depend on web hits for ad dollars - and I for one will not give them the hit they so desperately need.
Obviously Howard never recovered.
Bless Alex, may he rest in peace. His mind was brilliant, but he tried too hard to reconcile himself with Mother Russia in the end.
He wrote “Two hundred years together”, debunking Russian anti-semitism.
However, there was a lot of disinformation put out about him by the old KGB to try and discredit him.
[ ... ]
"How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
"This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.
"The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.
"However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.
"All this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
"There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
[ ... ]
"There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that 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. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.
"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be the unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.
"It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.
"Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?
"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."
— "A World Spilt Apart", Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978
He was a truly great and incredibly brave man.
A sad day.
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