Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the 1950s at the Kazakh prison camp that inspired One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
o use a Shakespearian image: during the late 1960’s and throughout the 70’s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn bestrode the world like a colossus…At so many moments, what our soiled age has had of conscience lay in this one man’s angry keeping. - George Steiner.
Update, 3:26 pm EDT:
Not a good day for humanists, as one more than anyone alive deserving of the term giant, has died. By the prosaic standard of column-inches, no artist or scientist alive these last forty years got, or deserved, a longer entry in our standard encyclopedias. So last night’s obituary bulletins were the closest any of us will come to hearing words of the specific gravity of, say, “Tolstoy has died.” And since his critique of modern destruction took in the “liberal” West as bleakly as it had that dark side of the moon that was Soviet Communism, contention over his presumed warts, arising from a Russian traditionalism that does not suffer modernity and its divers fools gladly, will last as long as his memory. Thanks to the epic grandeur of his moral witness and achievement, however, no one was more entitled to such warts, if that they be: to adapt a millenial Yiddish taunt, we should all be so imperfect.
And though the truly great might indeed, like the rest of us sinners toiling in their shadows, put their pants on one leg at a time, they deserve also, for our own sakes even more than their own, material accomodation that, in the end, is onerous only to the most ignorant among us. Fortunately, the townsfolk of Cavendish, Vermont were not among the latter, and made the life and work of their honored guest, from 1976 to his return to Russia in 1994, as free and clear of vulpine incursions as he might have wished:
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — When Alexander Solzhenitsyn sought refuge in the West, he looked for a place whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where residents had an ethic of respecting one another’s privacy. The southern Vermont town of Cavendish was just the spot.
The famed writer, who died Sunday at 89, became something of a local curiosity and a prized resident whose movements and even the location of his home were closely guarded secrets. He also became, for a time, a source of some annoyance to local hunters and snowmobilers after he built a gated fence around his 51-acre property.
But the issue was dispelled on Town Meeting Day in 1977, the annual state holiday when residents gather in school gyms and town halls to debate local budget items. At the Cavendish meeting that year, Solzhenitsyn apologized through an interpreter.
Dr. Gene Bont, a now retired physician who cared for the Solzhenitsyns — mainly the writer’s three sons — said Solzhenitsyn told residents he needed privacy to accomplish his work.
Solzhenitsyn added: “‘I know you have a great deal of freedom to hunt,’” the doctor recalled. “He said that one of the reasons he needed to fence off his property was that when he was living in Switzerland” — after first leaving Russia in 1974 — “he was interrupted so much he couldn’t get any work done.”
The town’s roughly 1,500 residents seemed to appreciate the explanation, said Town Manager Richard Svec, and became protective of Solzhenitsyn’s privacy during his 18 years living in Cavendish.
“He’d always been a fairly enigmatic person, and him making a public appearance to the local townspeople, that went a long way with the folks in town,” Svec said.
Bont added, “When the news media found out he was in Cavendish they just descended on the town to find out everything they could. People wouldn’t tell them anything,” and would even give reporters and television crews false directions when asked how to find the writer’s house…
He made rare appearances in town as well, in one instance turning up and offering brief remarks at a local parade marking the bicentennial of Vermont statehood in 1991.
Finally, in 1994, just before he and his family moved back to the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn spoke at the Town Meeting again, said Svec, who will play the writer giving that final address in a theatrical production devoted to local history later this month.
“Our children grew up and went to school here, alongside your children,” Solzhenitsyn told his neighbors, as interpreted by his son Stepan. “Indeed, our whole family has felt at home among you. Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not imagine a better place to live, and wait, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont.”
Over at United Press International, Martin Sieff closes his tribute to Solzhenitsyn neatly:
But in death and after, his miraculous achievements far outshadowed his understandable human limitations: Alexander Solzhenitsyn defied, survived and helped bury a monstrous system of tyranny that claimed even more lives than the Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler. His work and testimony stripped the last remaining rose-colored spectacles regarding the Soviet system from the eyes of Western leftists and other sympathizers. He consciously saw himself as the latest descendant and heir in the great line of Russia literary and moral titans. And he proved to be a living example of the power of literature and moral dissent. He proved the truth of his conviction that “One Word of Truth Can Change the Whole World,” and that, contrary to the most fundamental dictates of the Marxist-Leninist secular faith, the efforts of a single individual really do matter and can indeed transform the world for the better.
His importance, and fame is quickly fading. I mentioned his death at work today and got nothing but blank stares. Nearly everyone (its a conservative group) knows that communists killed more people than Nazis because they read or have heard about Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism book. Depressing that people are more aware of and influenced by the writings of a political hack than a true international hero.
Steve