This past week Solzhenitsyn died. It seems so long ago when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was published and then later followed by the Gulag Archipelego. Coming to America e gave a famous speech at Harvard which was critical of the materialism of the West. Rod Dreher in the Dallas Morning News summed it up well in his column:
Two men stood astride the 20th century as prophets without peer: Pope John Paul II and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Their experience and testimony contained and transcended the terrible truths of the bloodiest epoch in human history. And they died tragically – tragic, in the Greek sense: They were admired and even beloved. But largely ignored.
fact, as much as they loathed the atheistic, materialistic barbarism of the East, both warned in uncompromising terms of the spiritual and moral decay at the heart of the liberal capitalist democracies.
In his most famous address in exile, Mr. Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard's 1978 graduation, delivering an apocalyptic vision of Western civilization as spiritually decrepit, given over to pleasure and material gain instead of virtue and higher values – and no model for post-communist Russia to follow.
Many liberals who had admired the dissident novelist thenceforth considered him a reactionary crank. Conservatives who championed his anti-communism struggled with the Russian Orthodox believer's harsh criticism of capitalist democracy.
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