To Live Not By Lies

“Now that the uncut magazine pages lay before me, I imagined the truth about the way we had lived in the camps emerging like some hideously cruel monster into the light of day, where the ill-formed millions could see it – and in the luxury of my hotel room I wept, for the first time, as I read the story.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on reading the galleys of 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 

in late 1962 (from The Oak and the Calf)

A few hundred words in this space cannot begin to do justice to the life and work of author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

If measured merely in terms of the number of persons whose lives he affected, then no writer in the 20th century can compare to Solzhenitsyn. The beauty of his prose, the quality of his political ideas – these can be debated. But what will never be in dispute is his impact on the lives of countless millions – how he successfully used literature to expose the lies festering under the skin of totalitarian socialism, how his call to “live life not by lies” influenced generations of activists and artists, how his life and work was instrumental in bringing about the end of the Soviet empire. 

We had planned to run my May 13 interview with Natalia Dmitriyevna Solzhenitsyn in our November/December issue, to coincide with her husband’s 90th birthday. Yet he passed away just as we were putting this issue together, so we did some shuffling, in order to publish the interview in a more timely fashion, as our modest tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s life and work. 

Natalia Dmitriyevna often acted as Solzhenitsyn’s public voice while he was alive; now she will be the chief steward of his legacy. This was one of the last interviews she gave prior to his death, and it offers interesting insights into their views on literature and the world, and on the life they led together in exile. 

But, to reiterate, this interview – or any biography in the press – cannot do justice to this immensely important individual. After the press surrounding his death and funeral dies down, after the outlines of the mountain Lev Rubinstein mentions (page 64) begin to return, we should look to his work. I have personally just begun a rediscovery of Ivan Denisovich, which I have not read for nearly two decades. Even today, so far removed from the events that surrounded its publication, it is an immensely powerful work.

Enjoy the issue.