Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Proverbs 17:17 (05/25/23)
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TITLE: The Brother | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
05/31/23 -
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Alexandr was the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. His father was killed in a hunting accident before he was born. His mother fought every day for survival. He needed friends.
The adversity wasn’t always seen by the world. Alexandr was born in December 1918 at the end of the first great war. He died in August 2008 after Russia had been shaken to the core. He was a novelist, essayist and historian, unappreciated by many. Winner of the Noble Prize in Literature, the Templeton Prize, The State Prize of the Russian Federation, his work often sat on shelves covered in dust. Married and divorced twice to the same Natalia he married another Natalia.
Solzhenitsyn’s birth family got him off to a good start with their defiance of the government and their staunch adherence to the Russian Orthodox Church. His faith dissolved in adversity and he embraced Marxism until he criticized Stalin and served his first eight years in the Gulag. On the day of Germany’s surrender, while all Russia celebrated, he wrote, “There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours.” This experience of a decade of prison and exile transformed his faith back again into being an Eastern Orthodox Christian. At the end of his sentence in 1953 he was sent to internal exile for life in southern Kazakstan. Undiagnosed cancer brought him to the brink of death.
For every experience, from Gulag to Cancer Ward, his pen was active, recording each character, conversation and the hidden realities that drove the dark sides of life. Exploring the deeper philosophy behind systems not only returned him to faith but led him to repentance for his actions during the war. Many of his poems grew out of the dark night of his soul. His friends hid his works during the times they were banned. One of these friends was mercilessly interrogated for five days before revealing where one of his manuscripts was hidden. When she was released, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya hung herself.
Solzhenitsyn’s greatest hidden work, The Gulag Archipelago, composed from 1958 through 1967 sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was an expose of the Soviet prison camp system unveiled in three volumes and seven parts. The testimony of two hundred and fifty-six former prisoners are expressed and exposed. It became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Alexandr became the friend of the voiceless.
Under Khrushchev’s reforms he was released and exonerated with the right to express himself. After Krushchev was removed from power in 1964, the cultural repression returned. Solzhenitsyn angered the Soviet authorities, was stripped of his citizenship, became a non-person and had his work seized by the KGB. The secret police tried to assassinate him with a ricin like gel in 1971 and he suffered severely from the attempt. He eventually transferred to the United States.
In the west, he criticized the pop culture emerging on television and music. He wrote “The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits… by TV stupor and by intolerable music.” He also saw the good and implored Western countries to not “lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law-a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen.”
In 1990, Rostropovich and Solzhenitsyn had their Russian citizenship restored so they could return to Russia. The great writer summarized his life observations with this insight. “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
He would be right because the greatest friend in adversity would be God himself.
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