Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) died last night of an apparent stroke. Since prophets are desert dwellers, and are often as angular as the God they serve, their deaths usually don’t make a great amount of news. Those with the prophetic voice often live in isolation and are seen to be an irritant to those cultural gatekeepers who are often in the sites of the prophetic voice. Last night one of the greatest prophetic voices the West possessed in the twentieth century met his Maker.
Solzhenitsyn’s life included spending the years of 1945-1953 in the Soviet slave labor camps –- the infamous Gulag Archipelago — and the years of 1953-1956 in exile in Soviet Russia. Much of Solzhenitsyn’s writing was committed to telling the story of those eaten alive by the communist system and whose stories would have never been known had it not been for Solzhenitsyn’s pen. Out of fear of what would happen if his works were seized by Communist nekulturny, Solzhenitsyn’s writings were smuggled out of Soviet Russia and published in the West.
In mysterious providence, God used his enemies in the Western media to make a celebrity out of Solzhenitsyn the prophet. The contrast between the media-manufactured celebrity and the prophet Solzhenitsyn could have not been more stark, yet God used the media-manufactured celebrity status, based upon Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Peace prize in 1970, to check the communist desire to destroy Solzhenitsyn. The whole world’s eyes were on Solzhenitsyn and as such the communists were loathe to make the new celebrity disappear. Checkmated in their desire to do to Solzhenitsyn what it had done to so many other dissidents, communist Russia played the part of Jonah’s whale and after arresting and charging Solzhenitsyn with treason the communists exiled him by spitting him out on the dry land of the West along with his family.
Once in the West, Solzhenitsyn picked up where he left off while in the repressive USSR. In the USSR Solzhenitsyn’s theme grew out of a Russian proverb that said, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” This was the kind of theme that one would expect a prophet to have. Solzhenitsyn spoke this word of truth for those he called the “forgotten people” -– for all those who disappeared and dropped alive down the communist memory whole.
The word of truth that outweighs the whole world continued to be spoken once Solzhenitsyn arrived in the West. In a series of speeches that were later collected and published as Warning to the West Solzhenitsyn stepped up to the microphone and told the West, from a worldview influenced by Christian categories, what was happening in the world and why. Once the Western news agencies, which at that time were Fabian socialists in their belief system, began to realize that the words of the Russian prophet would, if taken seriously, not only bring the Communists down but also the Socialist West, they began to turn off Solzhenitsyn’s microphone and gave him the silent treatment.
Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address is a bracing example of his penchant to speak the “one word of truth that would outweigh the world.” In 1978, Solzhenitsyn mounted the rostrum at Harvard and speaking to and of the West said things like,
“Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected.”
Here Solzhenitsyn is decrying that the West’s worldview included the absurdity that man was inherently good and that all evil came from the individual’s environment.
Speaking of the press in the West,
“Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.”
Here Solzhenitsyn is faulting the press for only giving “news” that serves its own deformed worldview.
Speaking of the West’s herd mentality,
There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons…but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.
Here Solzhenitsyn speaks of how only approved majority opinions are discussed in the West.
Volumes of similar prophetic declamations could be quoted from Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a man for the times. The fact that so little is being said of him on the day of his death reveals that the times ignored him and went on their merry, God-hating way.
Oh, God of the prophets, show thy grace to raise up another prophet for our times.
