EN MEMORIUM

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

I remember clearly when I first heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I was a high school English teacher in a “provincial” town in the Central Valley of California. I paid attention because Solzhentsyn was described as an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial town in Russia. He came to the world’s attention in 1962 with the publication of his first book, “One Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovich.” The book couldn’t be bought on the streets of Moscow, but it was available in Yuba City. I read it and was awed by the book and by the man. Though relatively short, the novel was clearly a masterpiece which belonged on the shelf with the works of other great Russian literary giants. From the time that first work was published, he deserves to be mentioned along with Tolstoy, Dostoevesky, and Pushkin when writers and speakers name Great Russian authors. Even when the people and circumstances he describes in his stories were unbearably ugly and mean, the novels are infused with a spiritual quality and patriotism that is found in the work of those other great literary masters. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lived in the United States during his years of exile; but when it became possible after perestroika for him to go home again, he went back to Russia where he died on Sunday, August 3, at age 89.

I am moved even now when I read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which had to be delivered to the awards ceremony in Stockholm as a written piece. He couldn’t accept it in person because he knew that if he left he wouldn’t be allowed to return to his country even to bring out his family. He said ordinary people were obliged “not to participate in lies.” He said artists have a greater responsibilities. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!” Solzhenitsyn didn’t shirk his responsibility.