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A Moral Force Moves Into HistoryPosted on Aug 4, 2008
He was born into a Cossack family, which was just one of many indications that life wasn’t exactly going to be conflict-free for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday. The Russian writer survived eight years in Stalin’s notorious gulags and became one of his country’s most controversial critical thinkers, a process that continued during the two decades he was forced to live in exile.
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By Shenonymous, August 11, 2008 at 1:18 am Link to this comment
The pseudo intellectuals are crawling out of the woodwork.
Report thisBy RickinSF, August 10, 2008 at 7:29 am Link to this comment
Better dead than read.
Report thisBy bc41, August 9, 2008 at 10:17 pm Link to this comment
He seamed to offend intellectuals in America and they still remember that, but he certainly understood a struggle for freedom. His arrest was because someone else wanted his position. Eight years could turn to 10, or 20 by way of an angry official, no court of redress,. Solzhenitsyn was a fantastic writer telling of his hardship in the gulag and with his depictions of real people, won a prize, no trivial achievement. Two of his books were boring, history of WW I and story of a surveillance officer I thought, but others were great. I remember the story of Denisovich when he was just released from prison, took a train ride to an out of the way town, didn’t know how to walk right, how to speak to people, had to re-learn all that. I had trouble putting these stories down, going to reread them.
Report thisBy Jimmy, August 8, 2008 at 4:25 am Link to this comment
R.I.P, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Report thisBy Tony Wicher, August 7, 2008 at 9:01 am Link to this comment
Re Double U, August 6 at 3:43 pm #
Howard, leave it to you to shit on the memory of a great mind, heart and soul with the turd that was and is Ayn Rand. She is the personification of the diseased pimp and the rats sphincter. Of course you dig her. You make it a real effort to not vomit.
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Double,
I’m with U, man! I don’t know which is more disgusting, Howard or Ayn Rand!
Report thisBy Double U, August 6, 2008 at 3:51 pm Link to this comment
Tim, it’s good to know that someone has their wits about them. Greetings!
Report thisBy Double U, August 6, 2008 at 3:49 pm Link to this comment
Out of respect for the truth and for Alex, himself, we should not skirt the fact that his is one of those cases where the man was made by his time and his space. We can kid ourselves all day and night but Alex would have been just another mediocre talent if not for the circumstances that forced the dormant spark.
Report thisBy Double U, August 6, 2008 at 3:43 pm Link to this comment
Howard, leave it to you to shit on the memory of a great mind, heart and soul with the turd that was and is Ayn Rand. She is the personification of the diseased pimp and the rat’s sphincter. Of course you dig her. You make it a real effort to not vomit.
Report thisBy Double U, August 6, 2008 at 3:36 pm Link to this comment
The thing that pisses me off is that I always heard Solzhneitsyn was rushin’. I could just never figure out what his hurry was.
Report thisIf we need anything, we need real human beings like him.
By Shenonymous, August 6, 2008 at 2:52 am Link to this comment
An amazing mind has passed away from the midst of humanity. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one in high school I read and read everything he wrote that was in our library. I was surprised that Nikita Khrushchev was the reformist that allowed that voice to be heard. I thought the communists were all nefarious thugs. I still do, but that is neither here nor there. This article was really much too brief to do his stature justice. Although he was a communist in the early part of his adult life, he quickly became disillusioned with the totalitarian path communism usually takes. He then became quite the critic and was vilified by the Soviet body politic. He was not enamored with American politics either and turned his back on the conservative Republican government of Ronald Reagan. Why should he have been? This did not diminish his ability to write what he saw as human travesty. I did not find his writing boring nor did I see him as a neo conservative. If he was anything he was an old conservative and I see it as a reaction to totalitarian and oppressive communism. Trying to force him into an American mold is completely consistent with American hubris. He was a Russian with patriotism to his homeland. American liberals criticized him for that but his views were his own and did not need to be reconditioned to have vacuous American values. He also wrote revisionist history so that the truth be known about the behavior of the completely iniquitous and vile Soviet and the order of depravity they engendered.
Report thisBy Howard, August 6, 2008 at 2:25 am Link to this comment
He was a literary giant if there ever was one. Outstanding writer. Most influential, for sure.
Report thisAlong with Ayn Rand !
Just super writers.
By sophrosyne, August 5, 2008 at 10:13 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Reagan tired to use him and make him a court flatterer of Reagan’s immoral foreign policy and dasterdy domestic policiy which we still suffer from today. The great writer turned his back on Reagan and ognored him while living out his exile in Vermont. Reagan;s blood-soaked foreign advisors were furious that the great writer condemned them as much as he did the dying Soviet state. Reagan lacked the IQ to understand him and few Americans understood the kind of conservatism S. was talking about. It had few roots in American soil. S. deplored Ragan’s shallow version of secular, materilaistic, exploitive conservatism and saw through his phony rhetoric.
Report thisBy Tim, August 5, 2008 at 6:39 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Of course Solzhenitsyn was correct to call out soviet tyranny, but he was essentially a tsarist and a nationalist, not a libertarian minded person.
He supported the Vietnam war and called Dan Ellsberg a traitor for exposing the Pentagon Papers.
He was a neo-conservative and not much else.
He was also a writer of some of the most boring prose ever written this side of Ayn Rand.
Report this