Solzhenitsyn: Tribute at 89

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn went to his final sleep in accordance with his own desires, to die in summer and to die at home. Perhaps, as great as a writer that he is, it is but fitting that in his very final moments, he had gotten what he wanted—- what he desired.

But Solzhenitsyn did not had such luck all his life, being a sufferer of labor camps during the Stalin years in Russia, where to such torment that he had experienced, he had seized the inspiration for most of his written works, mostly so poignant and so honest, detailing without any hint of hesitance most of the time, the boundaries of human agony that slave laborers had suffered in Russian labor camps, and for that, he had garnered his one moment of glory, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 for his novel “The Cancer Ward”.

Yet, the great modern Russian writer owes much of his fame to the very comprehensive and absolutely masterful “The Gulag Archipelago”, a whole narrative written in three series from 1973 to 1978, and I know this for sure for I had my hands on the said book when I was a young college student more than a decade ago. I was so very awed and overwhelmed by the expanse and candor of Gulag; the efficiency of the Solzhenitsyn’s skill and method had been so profound that while I was reading it (although I haven’t got to finish it), I had felt as if I myself was thrown into those Russian labor camps that he had tried to specify, feeling the coldness of malice that lies in them, the rust of terror that had terrified the prisoners so malevolently, with fear and sorrow penetrating towards the bone, as slime and filth permeates all over like wafting demons in the air, and so pervasive the decaying smell that had surrounded the unfortunate souls caught in that quagmire. Solzhenitsyn was one such writer—- a very rare one—- to be able to let the reader enter the dimension or sphere of reality that the writer is presenting and propositioning, and eventually to be caught without any qualm into the truth that lies behind them, like being caught in an ever encroaching web of poignancy.

Definitely, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my most favorite writers of all time, along with other great Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Tolstoy.