Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He is dead now and will always be one of those odd figures who with nothing much behind him at all may have swayed history. I'll leave that for history to reveal that truth, or not. For now, simply because it is one of my favorite ballads, here is a long, positively epic, song about Solzhenitsyn's experience in World War II. He was certainly no Russian everyman: in fact in some ways this song simply stands for the Russian nation. And I think he would have liked this song too, though for complex reasons of deep seated civilizational love (I don't say nationalism because that is too pale a word for what Solzhenitsyn talked about). In any case, I love both songs, so here they are.

And a little anecdote. I used to work in a history department where Michael J., one of the grads, was a veteran of the gulag just like Solzhenitsyn. Michael spent 15 years there, from age 15 to age 30. He came of age there and told me once that his nation, his homeland, was the gulag. Like Solzhenitsyn he ended up at the Hoover Institute where he worked on his own history of the Soviet gulag.

I asked him once if he didn't think that Solzhenitsyn has already done it, what with his three vol. Gulag Archipelago, each at over 1000 pages.

He thought about it for a few seconds.

"Too superficial."