Word: solzhenitsyn
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...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at his home in Vermont in 1993, through his eldest son, with whom I went to college. It was snowing hard, and he came in from the small separate house he used as his study to join the family for dinner. He looked a bit gruff, but his eyes were kind. He asked me what my major was, and I told him it was literature. "What kind?" he asked. "English," I said. He said, "There are other kinds of literature, you know...
Thus began a strange new life for Solzhenitsyn. With his wife and three sons he settled on a 50-acre compound in rural Vermont, where he preserved every aspect of Russian life that he could. Once a year he would commemorate the day of his arrest with a 'convict's day,' when he reverted to the diet of bread, broth and oats he ate in the labor camps. He rose early every day and wrote until dusk - producing, among other works, his novel-cycle The Red Wheel, a vast, Tolstoyan account of the Russian revolution that runs...
...Solzhenitsyn was an icon of freedom to the Western world, but he did not return the esteem it heaped on him. As a man of enormous Christian faith, he regarded the West as spiritually deteriorated, and he sometimes baffled supporters and critics alike with his reactionary criticisms of Western democracy. In a searing speech to Harvard's graduating class of 1978, he observed that "a decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today...
...Then what Solzhenitsyn had long predicted came to pass: the Soviet Union ceased to be. In 1994, at age 75, a bearded, patriarchal Solzhenitsyn returned from exile to his native Russia, where he was welcomed as a hero, the prophet of the post-Soviet era. But his home had become strange to him. He had imagined himself as the conscience of his native land, and he certainly commanded a great deal of cultural authority - he was given his own TV show, and in 2007 Vladimir Putin visited him personally to present him with a state medal. But he was never...
...Solzhenitsyn remained hopeful that the coming centuries would bring with them a world where mankind's material and spiritual lives, our bodies and our souls, would be able to flourish together. After personally enduring and bearing witness to some of the greatest tragedies of a tragic century, he still believed that life could and would evolve and improve. "The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage," he said. "No one on earth has any other way left but upward...