It's hard to overestimate the impact of Alexandr Sozhenitsyn's work. I first read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch when I was in high school. Ivan is a political prisoner in Siberia, and in a dry, unemotional tone that lets the reality do all the work, Solzhenitsyn explains with devastating power how Ivan's life is dedicated to the incredibly hard work of simple survival in a work camp where no one really cares if he lives or dies except him.
But it wasn't, I realized, just about Ivan. It was about everybody in Soviet Russia. For the first time I knew what the life was actually like there and the price they paid in return for the eradication of poverty (if everyone is poor, no one is), starvation, and daily beatings by landlords or Cossacks hired by landlords.
The cost of making these things clear - to foreigners more than his own people - was enormous. Sozhenitsyn was exiled and left Russia to live in Hanover, NH - about an hour north of where I was brought up. He disliked America, I remember. He thought that whereas Russians didn't have enough freedom, we had too much.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn expressed a growing distaste for life in the West. "It's not your liberty we are criticizing," he told television journalist Walter Cronkite during a televised interview in 1975, "but the use you make of it." He castigated Western moral decay in even harsher - indeed, apocalyptic - terms at the 1978 Harvard commencement.
It was perhaps ineveitable that Alexandr, after spending his life inside the confines of one of the most profoundly restrictive societies that ever existed, had found the loosey-goosey, layabout-casual freedom of America with its rampant consumerism and its boundless worship of $$$ to be the Other Hell.
Asked once what the secret of his literary art was, he replied, "The secret is that when you've been pitched headfirst into hell you just write about it."
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Solzhenitsyn arrived on American shores at just about the moment (the early 70's) when Corporate America was poised to complete its subjugation of American society, and it seemed to take the heart out of him. Removed from his beloved Russia, he wrote very little in his last years, and what he wrote was weak in comparison with the brilliant rebellion of his earlier work. He was lost, out of his element, and terribly, terribly disappointed with the countries - America and Britain - that he had once thought represented man's greatest hope of achieving peace and equality.
I have to wonder if he foresaw the mess the corporations made when they finally gained complete control, owned both political parties, and bought the presidency for their favorite puppet, George W Bush. Solzhenitsyn often said that our destruction was inevitable given our lazy acceptance of consumerism and materialism as replacements for morality and courage. What but a failure of both could have given us a W?
But he didn't write about it. He never brought his formidable courage and insight to the American Problem. Who knows what may have changed if he'd been able to do that. He brought down one failed ideology single-handed. Why not two?
More likely, that's our job. If nothing else, we have his amazing example of how much can be accomplished with honor, integrity, and guts when the whole society is against you. With George W Bush having nearly destroyed the Constitution and everything else that once made America a beacon of hope for the Solzhenitsyns of this world, we could use a little of what Alexandr had in abundance.
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