Commentary Magazine’s website has several links to reviews of Solzhenitsyn’s work and articles on the man himself. In this blog post, John Podhoretz described Solzhenitsyn’s auto-biography, The Oak and the Calf, as “a book about temptation — the temptation to give in, to let the Soviet censor have his way here and there, to do what will make its author more comfortable even if doing so means bowdlerizing his own unmistakable vision of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist tyranny. . . . [H]e knew his path was one only a very few could possibly follow, because it required that one’s soul be made of oak, and humans with that kind of solidity come along a few times a century.”

In an essay called “Why Solzhenitsyn Will Not Go Away, Joseph Epstein quotes the author: “In Invisible Allies and The Oak and the Calf he speaks of carrying “the dying wishes of millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp.” And again: “My point of departure [was] that I did not belong to myself alone, that my literary destiny was not just my own, but that of millions who had not lived to scrawl or gasp or croak the truth about their lot as jailbirds.”

We would be greatly remiss not to note the passing of one of the towering figures of the 20th Century, both in literature and in the wider arena of culture: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn turned unbelievable suffering into vital art, and through that art helped to bring an end to a mighty evil in the world. Exiled to America, he found this country a deep disappointment. When he addressed students at Harvard on the subject of good and evil, he was booed. Yet he persevered, and triumphed. He was a Christian, of the Orthodox faith.

He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.