| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Obits- |
| Lileks on Solzhenitsyn |
| 2008-08-04 |
| In the summer of ’78 I was back home in Fargo between college years – exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown “culture,” almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away. Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea. The great brooding man is dead – all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldn’t have liked his Russia – autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land – but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. It’s a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 Reading the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, among other, is what helped get me interested in studying US-World History and Political Sciences/ Philosophies. RIP, SOLZY, YA DONE GOOD! |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-08-04 20:46 |