“No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.” ~ Solzhenitsyn

On August 3, Solzhenitsyn died.

“The man credited with exposing the brutality of Stalin’s purges and gulag system has died aged 89. Nobel prize winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in the 1990s. He died in Moscow in the early hours of Monday from a suspected stroke.”

He was a Nobel prize winning author, compared to the likes of Dostoyevsky, Chekov, and Tolstoy. Some call him a prophet. I call him a courageous truth-teller.

“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn’s first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) is a “forceful artistic indictment of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union.” This short novel opened our eyes to a typical, grueling day of the character’s life in a Siberian labor camp. Solzhenitsyn himself spent time in the gulags, imprisoned for making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend.

“He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities. ‘It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!’” ~ The New York Times

Albert Mohler shares: “Edward E. Erickson, who wrote two major works on Solzhenitsyn, argues that the key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is Christianity - the Russian Orthodox faith that framed Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. Erickson argued that “in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs.”

I’ll be looking more into the faith of Solzhenitsyn and share what I find. Oh, that we all would have the courage to write the truth!

Washington Post
Nobel Acceptance Speech in 1970
The New York Times article
WikiQuote on Solzhenitsyn
Speech at Harvard, 1978: A World Split Apart