Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died. He was 89. As the author of the Gulag Archipelago he became the conscious of Russia and contributed to the unmasking of the Soviet system. Here is an editorial that explains his legacy.
Solzhenitsyn spoke from a worldview shaped by the Orthodox church. From that vantage point he also criticized western society. His famous address at Harvard caused quite a stir and earned him the enmity of many liberal intellectuals.
Take this quote about the legalism of our culture: "I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
Or take this statement on humanism: "If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature."
He wasn't an infallible prophet, but he was courageous. And he spoke from a unique vantage point that straddled the great cultural fault line between the east and the west.
