Giant.(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)(Obituary)

THE headline in the Times a few weeks ago--SOLZHENITSYN, LITERARY GIANT WHO DEFIED SOVIETS, DIES AT 89--seemed to come out of nowhere. It was almost (I say this blushingly) as if he had already died. "Giant" is in his case precisely accurate, and yet ... wasn't the last time he got a headline in the Times because his TV show was canceled? That was as if a pope had been reduced to teaching Sunday school in the suburbs, and had gotten into some idiotic squabble with the parents association. How did Emerson put it? Every hero becomes a bore at last.

But it wasn't boring reading his obituary, to which the Times devoted two entire inside pages, the kind of acreage normally devoted to great statesmen, or indeed, popes. His life reads like a Russian novel, and a long one at that. It seems ironic that he became world-famous, in 1963, for a Russian novel consisting of a mere 160 pages; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky took at least that many to clear their throats.

He was born one year after the Russian Revolution, and outlived the Soviet Union by almost 20 years. He was jailed by Stalin, rehabilitated by Khrushchev, re-exiled by Brezhnev, welcomed back by Yeltsin, and a year before he died accepted a medal from former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. That's some arc. Only Churchill, who also used to lay bricks, though under rather more pleasant circumstances, lived that kind of panoramic biographical sweep.

I fell for Solzhenitsyn early, as a teenager, when my father introduced me to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read it, amazed and horrified. One comes away from the book the way one does from Primo Levi's account of his time at Auschwitz, numb and vaguely ashamed of oneself for having enjoyed the myriad benisons of American birthright.

I went on to his other books, but finally gave up about halfway through the 300,000 words of The Gulag Archipelago, when the account--or perhaps more accurate to say, accounting--of horrors reached a kind of surfeit-point. Gulag is, among other things, a work of meticulous reporting. Solzhenitsyn interviewed 227 other survivors of the prison system, and seems to have left nothing out. The sheer math of it is monstrous: An estimated 60 million human beings went through the gulag. Sixty million--roughly the combined populations of California and Texas.

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Reading about Solzhenitsyn puts one in mind of another giant figure of the Cold War era: Whittaker Chambers. As in ...