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Remember the Christianity Today article Unchained Faith: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and John Bunyan [click here for my post of an excerpt regarding Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)]. With Alexander Solzhenitsyn's (1918-2008) passing I am reminded of the article as I read Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89 (NY Times), Editorial Observer:  Solzhenitsyn in Search of the Russia That Always Eluded Him (NY Times), and Albert Mohler's "One Word of Truth Will Outweigh the Whole World" -- The Death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In the NY Times Obituary, Gorbachev comments [Solzhenitsyn’s books] changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present. Also a story is shared how he committed 12,000 lines of text to memory while in prison through the use of rosaries with beads made from chewed bread fashioned by Lithuanian Catholic prisoners.  Both NY Times pieces underscore how he was not listened to in the practical/political post Cold War Russia.  But each of us has our place to contribute our particular gift.  Solzhenitsyn offered the gift of storytelling and critique -- he was not called to rebuild Russia. 

Below's an excerpt from Unchained Faith regarding Solzhenitsyn:

The story was all too common for Stalin's Soviet Union. A devoted communist, decorated for his service in defense of Mother Russia, dares to question the paranoid despot and thereby becomes an enemy of the state he so loves. Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered for eight years in the Russian gulags, whose conditions had improved only slightly in the century since Dostoyevsky languished there. As with Dostoyevsky, however, that which did not kill Solzhenitsyn made him immeasurably stronger. ...

He was a true child of the 1917 Revolution, torn from his family's Orthodox faith and indoctrinated in dialectical materialism.

Solzhenitsyn was surprised, therefore, to meet Russians who still believed in God. After undergoing urgent surgery for cancer in February 1952, he was comforted one evening by a doctor who related his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. The next morning Solzhenitsyn awoke to commotion: the doctor had suffered eight blows to the head. He soon died on the operating table. No one knows why the doctor was brutally murdered, but his open Christian faith did not help his cause in the atheistic Soviet Union. In any event, the incident was no coincidence to Solzhenitsyn. He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "And so it happened that [the doctor's] prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders."

By this time, Solzhenitsyn felt hunted by the Almighty. He recovered from cancer and embraced Christ. "When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer," he recounted for biographer Joseph Pearce, "then I was fully cleansed and came back to deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life." Neither Solzhenitsyn nor the world would ever be the same. He was released from prison in 1953, the same year Stalin died. Nine years later, he published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which miraculously cleared Soviet censors due to Nikita Khrushchev's efforts to de-Stalinize Russia. This chilling novel, based on his gulag experience, exposed Russians and the world to everyday life as an enemy of Stalin's communism.

Along with The Gulag Archipelago, which incited the Soviet government to send him into exile, One Day dealt a crippling blow to communism's credibility. And it wouldn't have been possible without a resolute faith nourished inside the walls of Stalin's prisons.

To God be the glory!