Goodbye Aleksandr
Yesterday this world lost Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
His passing is a terrible loss for us, but I don’t find myself sad. He survived the gulag and lived to see his own pen defeat the regime that betrayed him and his country. It’s been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. We who lived in the twentieth century saw the pen mightier than an arsenal of nuclear weapons, mightier than the most extensive secret police force in all history. He lived more than eighty-nine years and he died in his homeland. I’m sure he liked Vermont, but exile is no good for a patriot. I can’t help but think that his story had a happy ending.
In his Nobel lecture, Solzhenitsyn invoked Dostoevsky’s phrase «beauty will save the world». Though Solzhenitsyn’s works were often quite dark and dealt with terrible brutality, they contain a hope beyond cloying optimism. It isn’t the empty hope that the terror will naturally go away someday, it’s the fierce kind of hope, the hope that says that the only reason for writing about terrible things is to stop them. Rather than convey an impression of hope, he found a way to inspire hope even as he depicted hopelessness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn left this world better than he found it. At his passing, what is left to say? Just this: Thank you.
