Russia Mourns the Death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“He was an outstanding personality”, that was the recurring theme of the outpouring of public and official responses to the death of the Nobel prize-winning Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who died on Moscow in the early hours of Monday. He was 89.

“We shall remember him as an strong and courageous man whose extensive literary output and public activity will forever remain an example of his selfless service to the people, his Motherland, and the ideals of humanism”, in the words of a message of condolences sent to the writer’s widow and his three sons by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Similar messages have poured in from President Dmitri Medvedev and fellow heads of state and government from around the world, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn rightfully has a place in the pantheon of world literature. His indomitable spirit, unshakeable ideals, and a life filled with trials and tribulations made him a direct heir of Fyodor Dostoyevsky”.

Human rights activist Vladimir Lukin said, “First of all, one realises the magnitude of Solzhenitsyn’s personality. He was an outstanding writer, philosopher, publicist, and political warrior, but, not only that. His personality left an indelible imprint on 20th century Russian and world history. It reminds me of the old Russian proverb, ‘What is written by the pen cannot be cut down by the axe’. Therefore, no axe, wielded with whatever power, can cut down what was written by the pen of Solzhenitsyn”.

Messages of grief and admiration came in from millions of ordinary Russians. The famous poet Andrei Voznesensky said, “For Russians, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s departure from life means parting with a whole era where he had the role of a prophet and spiritual visionary. Solzhenitsyn’s stance changed the outlook of a whole generation of people blinded by the outward appearance of the Soviet régime”. Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev said that Solzhenitsyn was a “righteous public man”; the famous theatre director Yuri Lyubimov agreed with him, saying, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was necessary as a symbol in today’s world, where guideposts have disappeared and one sees nothing but the degradation of moral values”. Fr Vsevolod Chaplin said, “Aleksandr Isaevich, both for his contemporaries and for our descendants, shall remain a model of internal freedom and human dignity. His words and participation in the Russian public dialogue shall be sorely missed”.

4 August 2008

Olga Bugrova

Voice of Russia World Service

http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=rus&q=79050&cid=22&p=04.08.2008

Solzhenitsyn: A Light unto the Ages

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), the greatest man of the 20th century and the prophet of our times

I found the following appreciation of Solzhenitsyn, and it so appropriate that I had to share it. It explains why most Western journalists, academics, and politicians hate Solzhenitsyn and his thought. The “condolences” that were the most galling to my ears were the shameless hypocrisies uttered by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice. They hate Russia and everything it stands for, especially its faith, and now they try to appropriate Aleksandr Isaevich for a prop for their American hedonism. For shame!

The Belgian Slavic languages specialist Barbara de Munnynck, who is Flemish, devotes two full pages in the Flemish-language newspaper De Standaard (8 December 2006) to enthusiastically paying homage to Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. She retraces and analyses his whole body of work and writes this very fitting conclusion.

“Solzhenitsyn is no longer in fashion because of recent political upheavals. Simply put, this man by his nature stands apart from all fashion. Although he is best known as a political writer, he’s closer to a religiously-inspired moralist. He critiqued the Soviet dictatorship from a spiritual point of view, not in the name of an alternative political ideology. Measured against the yardstick of Solzhenitsyn’s ethical criteria, neither the West nor the New Russia has any worth. For these reasons, Solzhenitsyn might be considered merely a grumpy old man or a perennial dissident. No matter. His attitude toward life, one of coherence, commands respect. It was forged under trying circumstances and has certain things in common with the Christian humanism of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and Edmund Burke. Solzhenitsyn is a venerable prophet whose message exists beyond the passage of time. The enthusiasm for him personally during the Cold War was as strange as the disinterest in him today”.

This is true. We stand at the passing of a prophet for all mankind, one who was not afraid to look reality in the face without dissimulation and who KNEW that the only distinction worth the money was the one between good and evil. Democracy and Communism are both man-made artefacts, ersatz substitutes for moral thinking. The USA and the USSR… Aleksandr Isaevich condemned both, for good reason. Both were nothing but Enlightenment opium dreams. The “American Experiment” has lasted longer than the Soviet one (it persists to this day), but, this is due only to a lucky geographical happenstance, not because of any inherent superiority in its system. If America had to face any serious external foes on this continent, the inner contradictions in the structure of 1789 would have collapsed it, just as surely as the inner incoherency of the Soviet structure of 1917 doomed it.

In the end, is there any REAL difference between Vladimir Lenin and Donald Trump? There is none that I can see…

Vara Drezhlo

Tuesday 5 August 2008

Albany NY

Russians Pay Last Respects To Solzhenitsyn

Russians lined up in the rain in Moscow on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer whose books did much to reveal the truth about the Soviet system of labour camps. Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel literature prize laureate, died of heart failure at his home near Moscow late on Sunday. He was 89.

The lavish ceremony saw the dissident writer’s body lying in state in the Academy of Sciences in the Russian capital. His open casket stood before a Russian flag as a guard of honour marched slowly past. Prime Minister and former-President Vladimir Putin placed a bunch of red roses by the coffin and offered his condolences to Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia, and his sons. The ceremony was also attended by a host of other top officials, leading cultural figures and scientists. World leaders have also sent their condolences to Solzhenitsyn’s family since the news of his death broke, calling him “a symbol of freedom”. In a telegram from the Russian government to his family, Solzhenitsyn was called “the country’s conscience and an embodiment of internal freedom and dignity”, and “a man whose books and life served as moral guidelines for the nation”.

Best known for his The Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of his and thousands of other people’s experiences in Stalin’s labour camps, Solzhenitsyn first came to acclaim in Russia and the world during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s political “thaw”. In 1962, his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a numbing account of gulag life, was published by the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir. However, in 1974, with the “thaw” a distant memory, and four years after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from Russia. He spent 20 years abroad, mainly in the United States, finally returning home in 1994, three years after the break-up of the Soviet Union. The writer, however, was disappointed with the new Russia, which he said had lost much of its spirituality, increasingly adopting Western materialistic values. He also criticised the West, saying after NATO’s bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 that, “I don’t see any difference in the behaviour of NATO and of Hitler”.

Solzhenitsyn will be buried in an Orthodox ceremony at the Donskoi Monastery in the Russian capital on Wednesday. He chose his final resting place himself some five years ago.

5 August 2008

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080805/115762667.html

The Ceremony of Farewell for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Began in Moscow

The ceremony of farewell for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began at the new building of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) on Lenin Prospekt in Moscow, our RIA-Novosti correspondent reported. The author, public figure, and Nobel Prize winner passed away in the early hours of 4 August in Moscow in his 90^th year from an acute heart attack. In spite of very rainy weather, many people came to the RAN headquarters to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn. People of all ages and walks of life came to give their farewells to the great writer. People can come and pay their respects until 19.00 Moscow time (15.00 GMT, 11.00 EDT). The funeral and burial shall take place on Wednesday at the Donskoy Monastery cemetery, as per the request in the author’s last will. Prominent political, public, and cultural figures expressed their condolences on the death of Solzhenitsyn, including US President George Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and former French President Jacques Chirac.

Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918 in Kislovodsk. During World War II, he served for the entire war and received military decorations. In 1945, he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in hard-labour camps and indefinite exile “for anti-Soviet agitation and attempting to create an anti-Soviet organisation”. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writer’s Union of the USSR, but, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, and the award cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Four years later, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union.

It was only in 1989 that his works began to be published in Russia, and Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the bookshops openly. One year later, in 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored to him. In May 1994, Aleksandr Isaevich returned to Russia. In 1997, he founded the annual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literary Award, which is awarded to renowned scholars, authors, and film-directors. To his last day, Solzhenitsyn rendered aid to the families of former political prisoners and subsidised the study of the New Martyrs of Russia repressed by the communists in the Soviet period.

5 August 2008

RIA-Novosti

http://www.rian.ru/society/20080805/115720290.html