Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

I was in high school when the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published, and when Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and took up residence in Vermont. I burrowed through each volume of Gulag as it appeared, and sought out everything else I could find — even his plays and prose poems. The ferocity of the writing in The Gulag Archipelago and the moral impact of the work made an enormous impression on me. Reading Solzhenitsyn made it clear to me that a commitment to human rights was far more basic than a commitment to any ideology of the right or left.

In 1978 I happened to be working as a student porter during the Harvard commencement, and I had the chance to hear Solzhenitsyn deliver his controversial speech. A cold drizzle was falling, and as the translator rolled out one section at a time, it took a while for the listeners to take in how radical it was. “This is terrible!” a middle-aged woman near me finally burst out.

As for me, I didn’t agree with everyone Solzhenitsyn said, but it was bracing to hear him inveigh against Western complacency and materialism from the same platform where President Derek Bok had been proudly announcing how much money each Harvard class has donated to its alma mater. It’s helpful now and then to have a Thoreau or a Solzhenitsyn remind you that a university is not primarily a money-making venture.