"His world was that of ethical absolutes, unshakable values, spiritual discipline and self-sacrificial commitment. . . His grim courage and selfless devotion, comparable to that of early Christians, gave him moral superiority over his communist adversaries. He defeated Brezhnev's Politburo, and, instead of being killed or jailed, was expelled from the country"
And Anne Applebaum adds this about how Solzhenitsyn's writing - not his charisma or TV appearances - was a powerful weapon against communism:
It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.
No comments:
Post a Comment