Another Brave Man Gone: Solzhenitsyn
Aug 4th, 2008 by John
Reuters photo
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, age 89, died Sunday at his home on the outskirts of Moscow. Solzhenitsyn, through his writings, made known to the world the horrors and tortures of Stalin’s regime against the Russian people. His little book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” at first banned from publication, was published by permission from Khrushchev in 1962. His massive chronicles of the prison camps is in Gulag Archipelago for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In years past, Vladimir Putin as a KGB operative led a persecution campaign against Solzhenitsyn.
Perhaps many know this line best from his Gulag memoirs: Gradually I came to realize that the line which separates good from evil passes not between states, or between classes, or between political parties – but right through every human heart. Solzhenitsyn sounds a little like Jesus in Mark 7:20-23, “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.‘” (emphasis added).
Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974, spoke at Harvard, and lived in Vermont. He returned 20 years later after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Popularity: 4% [?]
