Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was sent this short email about Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who died on Sunday, aged 89. I thought I’d share it.

His outspoken criticism of communist totalitarianism earned him many years of imprisonment in Stalin’s infamous Gulags and many more years in exile. His rare courage was underpinned by an unshakable commitment to truth and a deep sense of life purpose.

He was, however, also no advocate of the Western model, believing that Western society was eroding due to its whimsical pursuit of material well-being, its valuing of rights over obligations, and its misguided granting of destructive & irresponsible freedoms. Here are the closing words of his famous address “A World Split Apart” at Harvard University, 30 years ago. His questions are hardly less relevant to us today:

“Our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. … Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity? … We shall have to rise to a new height of vision … No-one on earth has any other way left but upward.”

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