From a ZENIT interview ("Solzhenitsyn's Prophetic Voice", Sept. 21, 2011) with Joseph Pearce about his biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Ignatius Press, 2011):
ZENIT: Who was Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Why should non-Russian audiences pay attention to his writing?
Pearce: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important figures of the 20th century, both in terms of his status as a writer and in terms of the crucial role he played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its evil communist empire.
As a writer, he was justly awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, unlike many other unworthy recipients. His novels "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" exposed the evils of socialism and totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn is a noble heir to the tradition of Russian fiction epitomized by the Christian humanism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
His epic and seminal historical work, "The Gulag Archipelago," possibly his magnum opus, documented the brutality of the Soviet regime's treatment of dissidents.
All in all, Solzhenitsyn's corpus constituted a damning indictment of the injustice of communism and served to undermine the Soviet Union's political and moral credibility; it contributed significantly to the rise of dissident resistance within the communist empire and to the rise of political opposition to communism in the West.
In historical terms, Solzhenitsyn deserves a place of honor beside Blessed Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Lech Walesa as a major player in the final defeat of Soviet communism.
As an intellectual, he is indubitably one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century; as a cultural warrior he is an inspiration for everyone fighting for the culture of life in our nihilistic times; as a political critic, he is one of the most articulate advocates of the Christian alternative to the dead-ends of Big Government socialism and Big Business globalism, a champion of the subsidiarist principles at the heart of the Church's social doctrine.
ZENIT: One of the major themes of your biography is that Solzhenitsyn was a prophet, first in the Soviet Union, and then in the capitalist West. How did Solzhenitsyn have the ability to diagnose the deeper problems of his time?
Pearce: Clearly, as I've said, non-Russian audiences should pay attention to Solzhenitsyn as a great writer, and as a great hero in the cause of political freedom.
He is, however, also a prophet. He predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s when most so-called "experts" assumed that the Soviet bloc would be part of the global political picture for many decades to come.
Even more importantly, Solzhenitsyn prophesied the unsustainability of global consumerism and the impending catastrophe that awaited a culture hell-bent on hedonism at the expense of human community and the natural environment.
The current chaos in the global economy serves as a timely warning that Solzhenitsyn's prophecies are coming true before our eyes. Solzhenitsyn's socio-political vision, which harmonizes with the social teaching of the Catholic Church, is full of the sort of Christian wisdom that the modern world can scarcely afford to ignore -- or, at least, the sort of wisdom that it ignores at its peril.
Read the entire interview on ZENIT.org.
Here is part of a 2002 review by James F. Pontuso of the first edition of Pearce's biography (the new Ignatius Press edition has a chapter about Solzhenitsyn's death, as well as other updated material):
Pearce's biography is not as comprehensive as Michael Scammell's out-of-print 1984 opus, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. But it is more probing, largely because Pearce, a writer whose previous work includes biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesteron, was able to interview Solzhenitsyn and his sons. A Soul in Exile highlights the extraordinary genius of Solzhenitsyn, recounting how he committed huge sections of The Gulag Archipelago to memory, fearing that a written version could be seized by the secret police. Pearce describes Solzhenitsyn's superhuman stamina — he often wrote for two eight-hour stretches per day, sleeping only a few hours between sessions. Solzhenitsyn's vast literary output seems to have been aimed not only at destroying the Soviet Union but also at rewriting Russian history in order to counter the widely accepted scholarly view that Soviet totalitarianism was more the result of the Russian national character than of Communist ideology.
Pearce demonstrates how many of Solzhenitsyn's much-derided predictions prior to the fall of Communism have come true. Solzhenitsyn anticipated that Communism would disintegrate, that the criminal element nurtured in the Gulag would take control of Russia's economy, that members of the KGB and the criminal elements were actually the same people, and that it would take 100 years for Russia to recover from Communism. Soviet experts in the West scoffed at these prognostications. Who's laughing now?
Most important of all, Pearce argues that Solzhenitsyn's highest goal in his writing was not political, but spiritual. Solzhenitsyn provokes people to consider their moral responsibilities to others and their personal responsibility for the development of their souls.
The Pearce biography includes lovely prose poems that Solzhenitsyn wrote after his return to Russia. The poems give us a glimpse of old age and of a personal reconciliation with death. It is almost as if Solzhenitsyn's body is in this world, but his spirit is reaching to experience the next.
Also see my interview with Joseph on Ignatius Insight:
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