There are two kinds of fictional writers--the clever and the prophetic. The first dazzles with style and content. The second imagines what we should be. Solzhenitsyn was the second. He did not fit in Stalinist Russia or the opulent and self-indulging U.S.A. He once said that humanity's real problem resides in the human heart, and thus humanity's solution must come from above, and for him, it was the Christ preached, lived, and institutionalized in a 2,000 year old tradition. He was not at home in communism or liberal democracy because both reject grace. He was been partially home in his church but now he is fully home. Rest-in-Peace.

There are two kinds of fictional writers--the clever and the prophetic. The first dazzles with style and content. The second imagines what we should be. Solzhenitsyn was the second. He did not fit in Stalinist Russia or the opulent and self-indulging U.S.A. He once said that humanity's real problem resides in the human heart, and thus humanity's solution must come from above, and for him, it was the Christ preached, lived, and institutionalized in a 2,000 year old tradition. He was not at home in communism or liberal democracy because both reject grace. He was been partially home in his church but now he is fully home. Rest-in-Peace.

As a novelist, Solzhenitsyn followed the path laid down by Dostoevsky, but as a moral force, he was all his own. With Gandhi and Martin Luther King, I believe he was the great moral force of the mid-late 20th century. His Harvard speech needs to be revisited by anyone who would understand his criticism of the west, and if the story of Lazarus's being raised from the dead was central to Dostoevsky, I somehow feel Paul's discussion of Christian freedom in Romans is central to Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn pushes us toward a higher spirituality. He was a great thinker and great writer. Unfortunately, not many will listen to him. Speaking at the 1978 Harvard commencement, Solzhenitsyn’s words portray a truth that is eerily applicable in 2008: “It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

Continuing on, he concludes: “On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”

It is with tremendous sadness and a overwhelming sense of loss that I read of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.His own moral,physical and spiritual courage was such a beacon shining over through and into the Soviet Hinterland and into the darkness of the Gulag Archipelago.But of course his voice and his vision reached further than that for not only did he expose the evils of Communism and help to bring down that system in the extinction of the U S S R as a source of oppresssion and fear but he understood as so many do not that personal peace and affluence which is the Capitalist West's present mantra has no defence against the loss of moral standards,personal integrity and the onset of evil in society.It has to be remembered for example that the Jews were not the first to be killed in large numbers in Hitler's Third Reich but it was the unborn, the aged and infirm and the mentally ill who were quietly and methodically disposed of before the war had even started.
Of course by the time of the mass singling out of Jewry in the European Continent the Nazi's had become experienced in the ways of death as observed by their bombing of Guernica so movingly portrayed by Picasso. The moral failure to resist later the betrayal and rape of Czechoslovakia was quickly followed by Polish ears listening to the rumble of German tanks into Warsaw and the World knows now what that led to in that devastated city and elsewhere and in the concentration camps. It is these lessons from life and history that the young Alexander never forgot.It was indeed his own personal faith in God that sustained him,it was the hope that the love of God alone who is the source of our being and light of our lives would shine in other hearts and give them the courage and daring to stand up and be counted before it was too late and a new and darker age,darker even than the Nazi tyranny could arise. We need another Alexander now but far more than that we need to come and with tears as the late Dr Francis Schaeffer would say to the foot of the Cross of Christ with repentance for the evils we have personally done,and the ones we have permitted by our silence and plead for mercy and a redemptive fire to seep through our nations burning up the trash we have made of life and our individual lives and strengthening the things that remain as Bob Dylan said. We are so much the poorer for Alexander's passing and I mourn a great man.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard in 1978, he brought to the podium a stranger's vantage point that allowed him to glaringly see the House of America's flaws in a way that the householders, spoon-fed on effortless comfort, could not. Those trust-fund kids who booed him were unworthy to unlace his Russian felt boots.

Solzhenitsyn was right. In its lust for superficial trivia, our culture has lost not only courage and willpower but also its awe of true heroism.

Eighteen months ago, Anna Nichole Smith died. She was a minor actress who would be alive today if she hadn't taken prescription drugs in dangerous combinations. For weeks thereafter, she was in the news every day.

Two months ago, Tim Russert died. He was the narrator for the NBC program Meet the Press; anyone who chose not to watch Meet the Press might not have known who he was. Yet for a week after his death, on all the TV channels it was all Tim all the time.

Two days ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. He was a hero who survived eight years in the Gulag and a bout with cancer, and he came forth shining like refined gold. He was unafraid to lay truth before power, and his words helped change the course of history. Yesterday I listened to an hour and a half of my local Christian radio station's morning talk show. Not one word was mentioned of this great man's life or passing.

We need people like Solzhenitsyn to live their lives before us. Those people will probably have to come from other countries.

Memory Eternal!
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In reading of and about Solzhenitsyn, I am struck with the similarity of his views and values to those of RJ Rushdoony. I wonder whether these two had ever met, or, better yet, had oppoprtunity to visit together. Both get at the core of the matter, that of the perversity of the hunan soul. Both have written extensively on the outwirkings of that perverstion, and its only cure.

We have no need of more like these two men to arise and lead us, or even to challange us. What of those few hundred who sat, many squirming and fuming the whiles, as Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed them at Harvarad these thirty years past. They heard the truth, and, I'l wager at long odds, have dismissed it in persuit of precisely the things warned against in that address. Mr. Rushdoony's works have been ready to hand for a generation.
No, the need is not for "new" voices to arise. The need is for the common man to HEAR the voices already trumpeting a call to change. And the bulk of the christian church leads the number who continue in slumber when we ought to be at the van of those hearing. And I mean "hear" in the biblical sense, as in DOING something about what is heard. Results come when one "hears". Who will hear?

As a newly-converted teen living on a Montana farm, I did a lot of reading. Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" series captured my imagination. Later, having moved to Chicago with the JPUSA community, I caught a movie version of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"; its stark Siberian reality (even if somewhat damaged by the movie's script compared to the novel) still haunts me.

Solzhenitsyn's vision of America remains problematic to me, not because it didn't have great truths in it, but rather because it also seemed curmudgeonish, and not a little naive. But of course I speak as someone "entrapped" within my own cultural milieu.

Most of all, I remember him for his heroism, his faith, and his endurance. Like some character right out of a Dostoevsky novel, he embodied a Russian brooding pessimism with a singular sense of unswerving, unbreakable faithfulness. He was, of course, a treasure we cannot replace.