On
good and evil humans
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s funeral last week deservedly received much media
attention in Russia and around the world. Regrettably, events over the
past days have pushed further reflection on the dissident’s life and
writings out of mind. Even before the outbreak of hostilities around
South Ossetia, scant notice was given to the role his Christian faith
played in his courageous stand against the atrocities of the soviet
system.
John
Hess, of YWAM Poland, has worked in eastern Europe since the 1970’s,
and offered this tribute to a man who, to most of those born after
1989, remains a mystery.
JH:
Solzhenitsyn’s passage to eternity on August 4 is, in my mind, an
appropriate opportunity to celebrate God’s sovereignty and His ability
to speak the Truth through one person in such a way as to change the
course of history.
Solzhenitsyn
was born in 1918, right after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. His
father had been killed in the Great War, leaving his mother to raise
him in exceptionally tumultuous times. He converted as a youth to
Marxism-Leninism, rejecting the faith of his Orthodox mother. However,
an indiscreet remark about Stalin in a letter he wrote during World War
II, while serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, dramatically
changed his circumstances. He found himself interned in a concentration
camp, a part of a vast system of camps which he rendered unforgettable
through his works, The
Gulag Archipelago.
It
was in the Gulag itself that Solzhenitsyn came to faith. That faith
completely transformed his understanding of his imprisonment, of human
life and the universe:
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years…this essential
experience: how a
human being becomes evil and how good.
In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my
most
evil moments, I thought I was doing good. It was only when I lay
there
on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings
of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the
line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between
classes, nor between political parties but right through every human
heart.
This line shifts. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small
bright bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all
hearts, there remains... an unuprooted small corner of evil. I say
without hesitation, ‘Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.’
I quote from a verse in this same passage of a poem he wrote
celebrating his return to God:
And now with measuring
cup returned to me
Scooping up the living
water
God of the
Universe! I believe again!
Though I renounced
you, you were with me!
Unlike
millions, Solzhenitsyn survived the camps miraculously. Sent to
internal exile, he sent the manuscript of a short book to a former
prisoner colleague, who impressed by it, submitted it for review to the
editor of the official (thus only) publisher in the USSR. The
editor,
in turn, wanting to publish what he recognized was excellent literature
but impossible to publish, went (Esther-like) directly to Party
Secretary Khrushchev, knowing his own future now was absolutely
dependent on the reaction. Khrushchev allowed the work, One Day
in The Life of Ivan Denisovich,
to be published–as remarkable perhaps as Cyrus allowing the Jews to
return to Israel after the Babylonian captivity! The first edition of
one hundred thousand sold nearly overnight (without the benefits of
ads!) and a million more were published in the second run.
Now
the cat was out of the bag! Thrust into the international spotlight, he
received global literary acclaim, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1970. His acceptance speech beautifully expressed–in my opinion–a
Christian view of the arts. In his ongoing battle against the KGB, he
exploited consummately the protection he now had of being in the West’s
eye.
Over
the next years, he began a secret project to be a memorial to those who
died in the camps. He wrote in the early hours, committed entire
sections of this project to memory by use of mathematical formulation,
and buried parts of the manuscripts in the forest. When his secretary
committed suicide, broken by the KGB, he ordered his confidant in the
West to publish The
Gulag Archipelago.
This
one book produced of shift of worldview wherever it was read, a shift
that would change the world. If any one event was responsible for the
tearing down of the Berlin Wall (and the demise of Communism), it was
the publishing of this work.
Shortly
before he was exiled to the West in 1974, he wrote an influential tract
clandestinely reproduced throughout Eastern Europe by hand, typewriters
and ditto copiers. Live
not by Lies
was exceedingly influential among millions longing for change in
Eastern Europe. It exhorted people in a system built on lies to live in
small ways by the truth as the means of battling the lie.
Once
in the West, rather than praise the virtues of Western democracy and
life as many expected, he castigated its elites for lack of courage and
moral fiber. In his 1979 commencement address at Harvard University–a
prophetic word to America’s elites in my perception–he went to the
heart of the problem, the rejection of God.
(Google: ‘A World Split Apart’). Has anything really
changed since?
Solzhenitsyn
was not a man of despair; his faith gave him a remarkable hope. His
life and works testify what God can do through ‘those whose hearts are
completely His.’
John concluding advice is: Do
take the time to read Solzhenitsyn if you haven’t already. He’s not
easy to read, yet his writings are suffused with a Biblical view of
reality, the goodness of God’s creation, man’s fallenness and Christ’s
redemption. Reading Solzhenitsyn is an education–in the true meaning of
the word.
Thanks John for this timely reflection!
Till next week,
Jeff Fountain
