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Our View: A powerful pen falls silent
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In this Oct. 28, 1994 picture, Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks in the Duma, the Russian parliament's lower chamber in Moscow, with the state flag in the background. In his first official address since returning to Russia from 20 years in exile, Solzhenitsyn spoke of the Russian social situation.
The Associated Press
Writers love to believe in the old maxim about the pen being mightier than the sword, but in their more candid moments have to acknowledge that it is seldom literally true. Every so often, however, a pen appears that is mightier not only than the sword but mightier than the concentration camps, interrogators and even the soul-crushing bureaucracy of a particularly nasty totalitarian state.
Such a pen was wielded by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who so memorably exposed the cruelty and barbarity that lay at the heart of the communist system in a series of memorable novels and polemics. Solzhenitsyn outlived the system that tried so hard to crush him by 17 years, dying Sunday in his beloved Russia, a country that both thrilled and disappointed him in its post-communist phase.
Not without his faults, including perhaps too much tolerance of the czarist regime's excesses and an eventual endorsement of Vladimir Putin, Solzhenitsyn nonetheless lived to embody the truth of what he wrote in "The First Circle":
"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country."
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