Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P.(OBITUARY)(Obituary)

AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union--so thunderous, so unexpected--the bystanders wondered who had brought it about. Was it the main actors on the spot, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, pulling sometimes in tandem, more often at loggerheads? Was it Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who rallied the willpower of the West? Was it John Paul II, who inspired the men of iron in Poland?

A case could be made for all of them, but a case could also be made for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Certainly Solzhenitsyn was the bravest: Gorbachev and Yeltsin were powerful insiders, Reagan and Thatcher possessed nuclear weapons, the pope led a great and ancient church. Solzhenitsyn had a few devoted friends, and his words. With his words, he shook the evil empire.

His literary ambition was to equal the Russian writers of the 19th century, those Easter Island monuments of history and psychology: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Belletrists say that his style is too relentless, too sarcastic to match theirs. But the style of his first work, and first masterpiece, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was as clear as water. This was a novella by a 43-year-old former officer, former political prisoner, and current high-school teacher, describing, from experience and observation, the life of an ordinary Russian serving a ten-year sentence in the gulag. In a brief thaw, the Russian literary journal Novy Mir published it; Nikita Khrushchev praised it. The last lines are some of the simplest and most powerful in all literature. "The end of an unclouded day," Ivan thinks. "Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days"--here it comes--"were for leap years."

Solzhenitsyn's greatness as a witness, and a judge, was that he remembered ...