Solzhenitsyn is perhaps my greatest hero. I loved Pope John Paul II, but didn't think of emulating him in more particular ways than growing in love for Christ. I don't think I really want to make a dichotomy between saintly and secular virtues (both men are remarkable for both anyhow), but Solzhenitsyn has been very inspiring in a kind of nitty gritty approach to life: his discovery of friendship amidst suffering (see First Circle), the joy of work for its own sake (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), and pure stubborn cussedness in the face of evil (Gulag Archipelago—his admiration for women's capacity for this kind of suffering in action is humbling.) I remember a friend in college reading her favorite passage aloud, the passage where Solzhenitsyn regrets that he and his neighbors each waited quaking in their individual beds while the KGB slowly gathered them in, rather than banding together in the darkened entryway with crowbars and camaraderie to give the KGB a welcome that would do it a great deal of good. This passage had not caught my attention when I first read it, but really, there are few places I'd rather be than crouched in the shadow with a friend and the cold iron, waiting to make evil take notice of virtue rather than vainly hoping that somehow my own little bit of the good would be overlooked. This was a couple of years before 9/11, which briefly awakened our nation to the falsehood of that commonplace lie which encourages conciliating evil in the hopes that after the bad guys got what they wanted, they would move on and leave you to gather up the bits of your life. Where this breaks down is when the bad guys want your very life, or are at least not opposed to you losing it. This shift in public mores is encapsulated in the robbery/murder scene of Batman Begins, but I digress.
The irony in the above photograph is that Russian officialdom (i.e. Vladimir Putin, aka Mr. KGB) is honoring him. Unfortunately, this is only lip service. A Ukrainian student of mine said that no one in the former USSR likes Solzhenitsyn: they liked the old days of security, and didn't like being told what bad things they'd done. And he couldn't understand why Solzhenitsyn would term Putin's Russia Russia in Collapse: "Why would he say such a thing? Putin is so powerful. We wish we could be like him."
And yet Solzhenitsyn has won in other ways. His Gulag is still inspiring friendships. One day, as a freshman in college, I overheard an acquaintance listing her favorite authors. I listened closely since I had just discerned my own list of four. She said, "Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Harry Wu, ..." [I could hardly breathe: this was almost my own list (mine contained a different Chinese dissident), just one name was needed to clinch the deal] "Solzhenitsyn." Ten years later, we are still best friends.
