Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the Red Army during World War II, when a letter to his friend was intercepted. In the letter, he was critical of Stalin, referring to the Russian tyrant by an obvious codename, thinking that would be enough to protect him. It wasn't, and Solzhenitsyn was thrust into the hellish world of Stalin's political prison camps. Many years later, he would emerge a wizened and hardened man, a prolific writer from whom we can learn quite a lot.
Solzhenitsyn just recently died (Aug 3, 2008). But his literature will live on much longer.
The crux of his work is the massive, three-volume "Gulag Archipelago". You might be wondering, what can we learn from a tome about the prison camps of the Soviet Union?
What Solzhenitsyn's works did for me was reinforce my understanding of, and appreciation for, how lucky I am. In general, any time I read about the hardships I've been saved from, just by being born at the right place and the right time, it reminds me how blessed I really am.
As a young citizen of the United States, there's very little I really have to worry about. All political joking aside, there isn't yet any serious risk that I'll be in a prison camp tomorrow. Solzhenitsyn writes about a people for whom there was no such guarantee. He writes, for example, of a woman who found an abandoned child and took her to a police station. The police, short on their quota and confused by the situation, sent the woman to Siberia. Or a man, who never learned to read and write, who would write his name on old scraps of newspaper just to feel good about himself. One day the newspaper he was scribbling on happened to have a picture of Comrade Stalin. An enemy of the people, to Siberia with him!
In a world of freedom, the most potent cage is the belief in non-freedom. You might have heard how elephants are trained: as babies, they are secured to a tree by a rope and can't escape. As they grow, they continue to believe the rope is invincible, and so a puny rope constrains one of nature's greatest beasts. Reading in the Gulag Archipelago, about the bravery and heroic acts of people in far worse lots than my own, it's like an elephant seeing another elephant break a much stronger rope. And realizing how flimsy my own ropes are.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn kept himself sane during untold years of imprisonment by composing a giant poem. He did it entirely in his head, while slaving away under backbreaking conditions, poorly rested, poorly fed. The point in that is to have something uplifting, something good and beautiful in life. Something that separates him from an animal. Holocaust victims in Germany did similar things. I read somewhere about a Jewish prisoner who would wash his hands before every meal, despite how futile it was, just to keep a shred of humanity.
If life is a game, then surely Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was playing it at a difficulty level far, far beyond any I've ever faced. The things he had to put up with make my life seem like I'm still playing in the tutorial mode. And if that's the case, it makes perfect sense that reading about how he played it, would give me some more insight into the game.
There was another episode in Solzhenitsyn's life which stood out to me. Described in the third volume of the Gulag Archipelago, after he himself was finally released and banished to Kazakhstan. An exile, he lived a life of squalor and destitution. Fortunately he had a four year degree in mathematics, which got him a job in a sweatshop doing accounting work, for much less than his efforts were worth, but still far better than most ex-prisoners.
Solzhenitsyn writes about how he saw an ad for a job as a math teacher at a college, and when he went to apply, the secretaries wouldn't let him, saying it was filled, even though it clearly was not. So he continued to work the accounting sweatshop, wasting away. But in his spare time, Aleksandr began writing, and this became a passion.
Eventually, he became so fed up with the accounting work, he began leaving early to go write. In doing this he defied all the rules. None of his coworkers would dare be so bold. And he also placed himself in grave danger. How easily he could lose that meager job, and be left with nothing! But he saw his writing as a higher cause, and began to remove the humiliating job from his life.
And then, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was blessed with fortune. He returned to the college to try again, and this time by sheer coincidence, a director was there instead of the lowly secretaries. Skipping their bureaucratic discrimination, he got a part time job teaching mathematics. Suddenly, this was a job with humanity in it, a job where he was helping people, and teaching people, and making a positive difference.
If Solzhenitsyn had done the safe thing and stayed doing number crunching slave labor at the sweatshop, we'd probably never have heard of him. He'd have died alone and unmourned in some hovel in Kazakhstan. Instead he won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.
And speaking of Nobel Prizes, please nominate these other articles I wrote for Nobel Prize:
Intelligent Design and Intelligent Video Games
A Modern Lord's Prayer
The Juggling Balls of Destiny
Solzhenitsyn just recently died (Aug 3, 2008). But his literature will live on much longer.
The crux of his work is the massive, three-volume "Gulag Archipelago". You might be wondering, what can we learn from a tome about the prison camps of the Soviet Union?
What Solzhenitsyn's works did for me was reinforce my understanding of, and appreciation for, how lucky I am. In general, any time I read about the hardships I've been saved from, just by being born at the right place and the right time, it reminds me how blessed I really am.
As a young citizen of the United States, there's very little I really have to worry about. All political joking aside, there isn't yet any serious risk that I'll be in a prison camp tomorrow. Solzhenitsyn writes about a people for whom there was no such guarantee. He writes, for example, of a woman who found an abandoned child and took her to a police station. The police, short on their quota and confused by the situation, sent the woman to Siberia. Or a man, who never learned to read and write, who would write his name on old scraps of newspaper just to feel good about himself. One day the newspaper he was scribbling on happened to have a picture of Comrade Stalin. An enemy of the people, to Siberia with him!
In a world of freedom, the most potent cage is the belief in non-freedom. You might have heard how elephants are trained: as babies, they are secured to a tree by a rope and can't escape. As they grow, they continue to believe the rope is invincible, and so a puny rope constrains one of nature's greatest beasts. Reading in the Gulag Archipelago, about the bravery and heroic acts of people in far worse lots than my own, it's like an elephant seeing another elephant break a much stronger rope. And realizing how flimsy my own ropes are.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn kept himself sane during untold years of imprisonment by composing a giant poem. He did it entirely in his head, while slaving away under backbreaking conditions, poorly rested, poorly fed. The point in that is to have something uplifting, something good and beautiful in life. Something that separates him from an animal. Holocaust victims in Germany did similar things. I read somewhere about a Jewish prisoner who would wash his hands before every meal, despite how futile it was, just to keep a shred of humanity.
If life is a game, then surely Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was playing it at a difficulty level far, far beyond any I've ever faced. The things he had to put up with make my life seem like I'm still playing in the tutorial mode. And if that's the case, it makes perfect sense that reading about how he played it, would give me some more insight into the game.
There was another episode in Solzhenitsyn's life which stood out to me. Described in the third volume of the Gulag Archipelago, after he himself was finally released and banished to Kazakhstan. An exile, he lived a life of squalor and destitution. Fortunately he had a four year degree in mathematics, which got him a job in a sweatshop doing accounting work, for much less than his efforts were worth, but still far better than most ex-prisoners.
Solzhenitsyn writes about how he saw an ad for a job as a math teacher at a college, and when he went to apply, the secretaries wouldn't let him, saying it was filled, even though it clearly was not. So he continued to work the accounting sweatshop, wasting away. But in his spare time, Aleksandr began writing, and this became a passion.
Eventually, he became so fed up with the accounting work, he began leaving early to go write. In doing this he defied all the rules. None of his coworkers would dare be so bold. And he also placed himself in grave danger. How easily he could lose that meager job, and be left with nothing! But he saw his writing as a higher cause, and began to remove the humiliating job from his life.
And then, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was blessed with fortune. He returned to the college to try again, and this time by sheer coincidence, a director was there instead of the lowly secretaries. Skipping their bureaucratic discrimination, he got a part time job teaching mathematics. Suddenly, this was a job with humanity in it, a job where he was helping people, and teaching people, and making a positive difference.
If Solzhenitsyn had done the safe thing and stayed doing number crunching slave labor at the sweatshop, we'd probably never have heard of him. He'd have died alone and unmourned in some hovel in Kazakhstan. Instead he won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.
And speaking of Nobel Prizes, please nominate these other articles I wrote for Nobel Prize:
Intelligent Design and Intelligent Video Games
A Modern Lord's Prayer
The Juggling Balls of Destiny
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1 comments:
Wow, I actually didn't know that about elephants. (The rope thing you mentioned above)
That's some pretty mind warping stuff.
Makes me wonder what "ropes" I have in my life...
Time to get out the scissors. :)
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