Alexander Solzhenitsyn died

We had the enviable and difficult fate of being contemporaries of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Enormous literary talent, the variety of forms in which this gift was realized, the unity of biography and creativity - all this makes Solzhenitsyn one of the most prominent figures in Russian and world culture of the twentieth century.

Usually the scale of the personality and talent of an artist and thinker is not realized immediately, sometimes after decades. We are only now beginning to understand that we lived at the same time and on the same land as Varlam Shalamov and Vasily Grossman. With Solzhenitsyn it was different: on that November morning in 1962, when reading Russia first opened the eleventh book of The New World, it became clear to everyone that a new stage had begun in Russian literature.

In 1967, in a letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers, a new Solzhenitsyn was revealed to the reading public: a brilliant political publicist, an uncompromising fighter for civil liberties, above all for freedom of thought and speech. Human rights activists considered Solzhenitsyn one of their own; for several years in the country and in the world he was considered as dissident No. 1. But Solzhenitsyn was not only a dissident: he knew how to combine in himself a political fighter against the regime and a person who dreams of ending the two-century confrontation between government and society, of the Great Reconciliation of Russian power and Russian intelligentsia.

Since the mid-1970s, with his “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union”, several essays published in the collection “From Under the Blocks” collected by him and his like-minded people, and articles written in exile, Solzhenitsyn has declared himself as an original and strong political thinker. His harsh criticism of the mechanisms of modern democracy, the secularization of Western society, and other foundations of modern European civilization created for him a strong reputation as an “anti-Western” and even a nationalist. But Solzhenitsyn, like his predecessor Dostoevsky, does not fit into the framework of these definitions. His search for a “special path” for Russia was nothing more than a sincere attempt to combine what he considered Russian national values ​​with the Christian culture of Europe, a continuation of the spiritual searches of Russian religious philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Neither we, nor anyone else, can pretend to appreciate today, now, the significance of the intellectual heritage of Solzhenitsyn the thinker. Solzhenitsyn’s historiosophical views, political philosophy and journalism will be debated for many decades to come. Or maybe these discussions, like the debates around Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, will always last - at least as long as the Russian intelligentsia itself exists as a socio-cultural phenomenon. However, regardless of the attitude of his contemporaries and descendants to the socio-political positions of Alexander Isaevich, that incredible energy, that fierce conviction and that literary brilliance with which Solzhenitsyn formulated and defended his views, in themselves make his journalism an outstanding cultural phenomenon.

For us, for the International Memorial Society, Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago” is of great importance. In this, as the author defines it, “an experience of artistic research,” he managed to combine two previously separated streams of memory about state terror: direct personal experience of witnesses and victims of the largest national catastrophe of the century and attempts to critically comprehend known and newly discovered historical facts. The main result of this work was not so much new knowledge about terror, but the acquisition of the integrity of historical understanding. Essentially, “The Gulag Archipelago” is a titanic attempt to create a new national historical consciousness, an alternative to the false, full of omissions and falsifications of the official version of Soviet history.

For many years to come, right up to the last years of perestroika, “The Gulag Archipelago” became one of the most popular and most persecuted samizdat texts. It was confiscated during searches, for reading or possessing it, they were kicked out of work and expelled from universities, for its distribution and reproduction they were arrested and tried. However, despite this, copies of foreign publications were secretly imported into the USSR, and here the book in hundreds of copies was printed using a photo method, copied on duplicating machines and retyped on typewriters.

In the West, “The Gulag Archipelago” also made a stunning impression as irrefutable evidence of the costs and results of the communist experiment. The clerical abbreviation of the name “Main Directorate of Camps” became a metaphor, and the word “Gulag” was included in all dictionaries of the world as one of the designations for the concept of “humanitarian catastrophe of political origin and national or global scale.”

“The Gulag Archipelago” marks the beginning of a new stage in understanding the Russian history of the 20th century. The need to work with the past for the sake of the future has become obvious to many people. At first there were dozens of such people, then there were hundreds and thousands of them. Attempts at independent historical research in the 1970s, a broad social movement in the late 1980s, memorial work that began in the 1990s and continues to this day - the starting point for all of this was the grandiose “experience of artistic research” carried out by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Now many will start talking about “the end of the Solzhenitsyn era.” We categorically disagree with this. “The era of Solzhenitsyn,” the era of restoration of historical memory, does not end with his departure.

Moscow, August 4, 2008