R.I.P. Solzhenitsyn

R.I.P. Solzhenitsyn

Credit: TLS

Solzhenitsyn’s life was spent writing in defense of human freedoms. For doing so he was sent to a Siberian hard labor camp and later into exile. Today his pen survives but the once mighty and repressive Soviet Empire is no more. God, for Solzhenitsyn, was the source of all that is dignified and the church beacon of hope and beauty. In honor of his death, here is an excerpt from one of his prose poems,

A Journey along the Oka

    Traveling along country roads in central Russia, you begin to understand why the Russian countryside has such a soothing effect.

    It is because of its churches. They rise over ridge and hillside, descending towards wide rivers like red and white princesses, towering above the thatch and wooden huts of everyday life with their slender, carved and fretted belfries. From far away they greet each other; from distant, unseen villages they rise towards the same sky.

    Wherever you may wonder, over field or pasture, many miles from any homestead, you are never alone; above the wall of trees, above the hayricks, even above the very curve of the earth itself, the dome of the belfry is always beckoning to you, from Borki Lovetskie, Lyubichi, or Gavrilovskoe ...

    People have always been selfish and often evil. But the Angelus used to toll and its echo would float over village, field, and wood. It reminded man that he must abandon his trivial earthly cares and give up one hour of his thoughts to life eternal. The tolling of the eventide bell, which now survives for us only in a popular song, raised man above the level of a beast …

Stories And Prose Poems (1971), Trans. by Michael Glenny, NY: FS & Giroux, p.263-4