The passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn affords opportunity to reflect on one of the greatest lives of the bloodiest of centuries. The Independent, which conducted his last print interview, is right in its characterization: rebel, prisoner, poet and hero. The heartbreaking accounts of Stalin’s labor camps will be remembered as among the most profound works of modern literature. Robert Conquest, a poet and historian of communism, places him in the company of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. He made history through his writings, but he also served as a prophetic voice – warning against a mythologized egalitarianism and doing more than any other person to break wide open the lie that Lenin and Stalin had created anything other than a monstrosity. Solzhenitsyn refused to identify the world with the material only: there must also be spirit, a still voice that calls humans away from the edge of bestial barbarism. He considered it pointless for humans to only pursue wealth, power, order, freedom. The ends of material maximization are empty and soul-destroying. Such an aim leads to shallow and destructive ideas. This one thing, he conveyed forcefully and consistently, must never be forgotten: all face death, and death is determined by life. We should not be so busy so as to forget that we will die. A right should not noisely crowd out its content, and the spirit must not be starved. He will be hugely missed.
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