A Giant's Shoulders

His name implied a certain foreign grandeur, a weightiness, possibly a sense of hard labour, so it was a relief that the actual work was clear and approachable. I'd guess that for many of my generation reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn marked their first exposure to any kind of contemporary literature outside their immediate 'western' experience. I remember feeling enormously pleased with myself for reading and, more importantly, 'getting' A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, but considering the remarkable economy of expression and straightforward vigour of its ideas who wouldn't have instantly 'got' it? (The film starring Tom Courtenay was, I think, the first 'serious' film I went to see, and well worth seeing it was.) By the time I went to university it was rare to find a student's room that didn't have a copy of Cancer Ward or The First Circle or August 1914 lying on a bookshelf, and to think that this all came before the publication in the west of the monumental Gulag Archipelago. When I first heard that title I had no idea what 'gulag' meant, the word being almost entirely unfamiliar at the time, an indication of the degree to which Solzhenitsyn can be said to have constructed a crucial twentieth century landscape of our minds.

It was obvious from his work that this was a writer who was in any number of ways as odd as his courage made him admirable. Not someone who would make a good houseguest - a man given to quirks and obsessions. Yet there was always that certainty that at the core of things he'd got it right; somehow from a seemingly limited perspective, that of a not particularly important victim of the system, he'd managed to grasp the system in its awful entirety. That's what I felt when reading The First Circle, my favourite among the early novels and, I believe, along with 1984 an almost perfect read for a bright somewhat idealistic young teenager in terms of giving them exactly the kind of political education they need.

Waking to news of Solzhenitsyn's death on the BBC this morning, I confess to a faint sense of surprise that he was actually still alive. At first I thought in terms of him being somehow yesterday's man, but the more I've considered this through the day the surer I am that it's quite wrong to see it in those terms. What was striking about his fiction was how it transcended the immediate, awful circumstances which might be said to have engendered it. The sheer scale of what the writer took on is in itself a lesson for us in the desperate need to keep faith with the truth and, above all, speak truth to power.

I'm guessing that there's going to be a sense in the obituaries of the passing of something (rather than someone) of massive nobility, and that we, thankfully, Shall never see so much, nor live so long. And so there should be - his death leaves us taller yet diminished.