Last Sunday, the world lost one of its best known literary figures when Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate Russian writer, died in Moscow. In the second half of the 20th century, he attracted worldwide attention for exposing the cruel crushing of human freedom and dignity on a massive scale under Stalin’s communist dictatorship. His works, most notably One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Arechipelago, were inspired by his own experience in Soviet prison camps. Solzhenitsyn did not match the literary greatness of the giants of Russian literature — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and others — who plumbed deeper depths of the human drama than he did. Nevertheless, in an era marked by the Cold War hostilities between the USA and the erstwhile USSR, he attained an iconic status in the West as the authentic voice of anti-communism. The West soon discovered that he was a complex personality. During his life in exile in the US, he was disillusioned by seeing the moral decay and spiritual emptiness of the media-dominated Western society, and wrote, “...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by television and rock music.” After his return to Russia in 1994, he emerged as a staunch Russian nationalist and admirer of Putin.

In the outpouring of homage to Solzhenitsyn last week, one thought of his stood out. He wrote that while ordinary men were obliged ‘not to participate in lies,’ artists and writers had a greater responsibility. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!” The Soviet communism’s claim that it was the best system for mankind was a lie, and many courageous novelists, poets, filmmakers, singers, and philosophers and others contributed to defeating this lie.

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