"No one on earth has any other way left but upward." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I first encountered Alexander Solzhenitsyn intentionally, as part of a personal effort to taste the Russian authors. I began with his book, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, a novel of fact and personal experience which follows one prisoner through an ordinary day in a work camp in Communist Siberia.

I will be frank with you; I chose that book because it was much shorter than War and Peace. I figured that, since I didn’t know whether I would like they style of a Russian author, I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew. I would only allow myself to become emotionally invested in a smaller sample. Smaller it is, but glorious.

Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, beginning in 1945. Eventually, as a result of his writings, he had his citizenship revoked by the USSR and was exiled, eventually ending up in the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.

In 1978 he was invited by Harvard university to address the student body. But that speech was marked by a grave disrespect shown by nearly everybody in attendance, including the faculty, as he began to unburden himself in a fearless and transparent critique of Western culture.

Who better to critique the west? Solzhenitsyn was no proponent of communism, having suffered so much under it. He hated the low estate which the atheistic government of his home land had produced among the Russian people. Adopted by the richest, most “successful” nation on earth, he enjoyed full freedom to commend his ideas and observations to people. He was free to write, and being a newcomer, he could view circumstances objectively, with the fresh perspective of someone who has not been desensitized by immersion. But he was apparently not free to confront those educators and their progeny with truths about the moral condition of our society, for they would not listen.

Consider what he said about that which our culture cannot satisfy: “[T]he human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.” Could it be that a man who had to learn to be by himself with God in a vicious, brutal gulag learned how to be satisfied without the gadgets and the distractions which we use as a substitute for contentment?

He was heckled and booed during his speech that day. He confronted young, power-hungry humanists with the idea that God was the only satisfactory answer for the problems of society and the yearnings of life, and in return he was mocked and ignored – the sound of Nero’s fiddle in the halls of higher learning.

He supposedly said later that the reception to his speech was the saddest moment of his life. It should be an occasion of sadness for all of us, as well. Look at this man who, by virtue of his honesty in the face of mass indifference, stands in the company of the prophets before him. He learned how to face the demands of truth while shuddering under a threadbare jacket, a thin rag wrapped around his face, toiling under the blast of arctic winds in a camp at the end of the world. His haunted legacy haunts us as well, if only we knew it.