Christian History Home > Issue 65 > Literature of Protest: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature of Protest: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The high school physics-teacher-turned-novelist whose writings shook an empire
Edward E. Ericson, Jr. | posted 1/01/2000 12:00AM
A high school teacher in his hovel far from home spends every spare minute writing—and then burying the manuscripts in jars. Who could have guessed that he was changing history? A Soviet-era joke set in the future has a teacher asking who Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev was and a schoolgirl replying, "Wasn't he some insignificant politician in the age of Solzhenitsyn?"
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!"
After prison, Solzhenitsyn poured out once-unimaginable tales of the brutality of Soviet prison life. With One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, ...
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