Edward Said and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, dissident heroes of two sharply divergent political traditions, had a surprising amount in common. Both came from cultures that had been violently uprooted and dislocated; both were exiled, their lives threatened; both found refuge eventually in the United States
Hypermodern Said, arguing over the fate of the Holy Land, reached for biblical cadences; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, trapped in far-off Russia, lived his life in the mode of a biblical prophet. Imprisoned in 1945 for writing anti-Stalinist letters from the front (where he was an artillery officer), he seemed to have enjoyed the opportunity to see the camps. Released in 1953, he moved to a small town, far from Moscow, teaching high school math and writing in secret. It was only after Khrushchev was well into his anti-Stalinization campaign that Solzhenitsyn decided he could submit his work for publication. The result was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about life in a Kazakh labor camp, released in the Soviet Union in 1962 and translated into English a year later.
As a boy, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn planned to find fame through commemorating the glories of the Bolshevik Revolution. But as an artillery captain, he privately criticized Stalin and got packed off to eight years in the prison camps. There, the loyal Leninist encountered luminous religious believers and moved from the Marx of his schoolteachers to the Jesus of his Russian Orthodox forefathers: God of the Universe! he wrote, I believe again! Though I renounced You, You were with me!
Today as the Cold War rapidly disappears from modern consciousness, Solzhenitsyn is less well-known. But he remains the indispensable witness to and keenest interpreter of the century's greatest intellectual and political conflict. New Yorker editor David Remnick calls him our age's dominant writer and says, No writer that I can think of in history, really, was able to do so much through courage and literary skill to change the society they came from. And, to some extent, you have to credit the literary works of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn with helping to bring down the last empire on earth.
