An extraordinary man. I will be re-reading some of his works this year. The world is blessed to have had him and should not forget what he did for his country.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

He spoke in a voice “magnificent in tone, speaking to our time from the center of sorrow, from the center of the earth.”

R.I.P.

n/t

Gulag Archipelago was amazing to me. I couldn’t believe that I was reading the things I was reading.

Now that he’s dead, keep an eye out… I fear we’ll see people begin to shrug again… you know the routine, I’m sure.

Surely the book contains exaggerations.
Surely it’s propaganda to benefit the West.
Surely it wasn’t that bad.
Hey, we throw people in jail too.

So on and so forth.
Be vigilant against those who will push to re-interpret the past now that the historians who wrote down what actually happened are dying or dead.

…in any language.

Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, First Circle, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

…because he documented, in a grand national epic story cycle, the carnage and soul-crushing waste of the most murderous political philosophy of modern times.

As much as he wrote for and about his native Russia, I always felt that he gave voice to those others trapped in the captive nations who never had a Solzhenitsyn of their own (or whose Solzhenitsyns perished in some awful punishment camp unremarked and unpublished).

And he’s on it. Read Ivan Denisovich when I was a sophomore in high school. It needs read again I believe.

Unfortunately I went to the two bookstores near me, and none of his books were at either one.

I cannot think of any human being still living who writes with the moral force and power that Solzhenitsyn brought to bear upon the tremendously sorrowful, the stupidly criminal, the insipid mendacities and institutional horrors that were the central subject of his greatest works.

Every person on Earth who considers themself literate should read at least one of his books, slowly and carefully, perhaps more than once, to really absorb the words and the meaning in all their awesome and terrifying depth. That is the fullest tribute we can pay to this great man. Godspeed.

that this is part and parcel with the recent passing of Buckley and Friedman, all of the great minds and players of the cold war era are passing.

The world must get on without them somehow, but we have their moral and intellectual teachings to stand upon.

on the West and the American condition to be quite remarkable.

Regarding the media:

“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.

Such as it is, however, 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? “

And, on the impact of the Renaissance:

“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.”

and a fearless chronicler of the evils of the Soviet system.

I remember his powerful witness to the corruption and venality of the Yeltsin years when he spoke to the Russian parliament in 1994. He could have pretended that all was well after the fall of Soviet communism and his return frome exile. He did not.

Longtime liberal lurker who enjoys discussions in good faith.

Some of us came of age at a time when Solzhenitsyn was denounced as a “fascist” because he refused to condemn the Orthodox Church and other Russian institutions, or simply refused to embrace what Marxism became. Birdmojo above has hit upon something that doesn’t need to be allowed to happen: revisionist history of this complex man and the evil he exposed.

There are great parallels between what happened within the United States and Western Europe during Solzhenitsyn’s New England exile and the Left’s denial of the external threats we face today. It is always easier to avoid discussion of cattle cars, gulags, and beheadings, but great men inevitably force us to acknowledge there is evil in the world. Solzhenitsyn indeed was a difficult historian, but one the world sorely needed.