Saturday, 20 September 2008 00:00 Written by William Rice Hall

In 1962 on the sword side was the Soviet communist empire. On the pen side was an obscure high school teacher in his 40s who was both a cancer survivor and a survivor of the Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet prison system, which held as many as 20 million people during Stalin's reign of terror and in which some 1.5 million perished from the brutal conditions in the Siberian forced labor camps and prison colonies.

If this does not seem a fair and balanced match between the two sides, it wasn't. This young, decorated artillery officer had come through incredible adversity and exposure to the harshest realities of evil to a faith and trust in God which proved to be more than a match for the communist evil empire.

When he entered the cruel prison system he was a communist, but events he experienced, and persons he met in the adversity of prison existence gradually brought him to faith in Christ. He wrote in his The Gulag Archipelago: "It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts."

Later he wrote regarding his prison experience, "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life," and he expressed this prayer, "God of the Universe! I believe again! Though I renounced You, You were with me."

He penned a little book he entitled One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel describing just one day in the life of a typical zek (inmate) surviving a "tenner" or 10-year sentence in a Soviet slave labor camp in Siberia. His pen did prove mightier than the steel sword of the cruel and evil repression of innocent persons under Stalin's communist regime. The book was powerful in the likeness of the greatest classics of world literature.

When Novy Mir editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, was reading the novel for the first time to see if it was publishable, reading in bed and in his pajamas as was his usual custom in evaluating material submitted for publication, he was thunder-struck by the sheer genius of what he realized was a masterpiece of world literature. He got out of bed and dressed himself in his best tuxedo, which he felt was the most appropriate way to finish the novel. Then he passed it on to Khrushchev, who passed it on to the politburo. The novel was published in Novy Mir (The New World, Russia's most prestigious literary journal), in 1962. It was also made available in book form. All copies sold out. It was a publishing phenomenon. It exploded on the world scene and ignited a clash of good and evil of global proportions.

This was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Read his works. His grasp of truth and of evil is almost unbelievable and unparallel. Neither East nor West could abide his fierce grasp of reality in regard to right and wrong, good and evil.  His role in the collapse of the Soviet empire was crucial. He was rejected by Soviet leadership and then ignored by the masses when his indictment of human evil was too heavy for them to accept. At Harvard University's commencement exercises in 1978 in his address, "A World Split Apart," Solzhenitsyn diagnosed the social and political diseases of the West and of America until his audience at Harvard and the liberal intellectual establishment in general reacted in pain and hostility.

Recently a rather large number of well known personalities have died. Many of these persons the world eulogized. But after Sunday, August 3, 2008, relatively few recognized the passing of one of the greatest ever diagnosticians of the world's ills and evils.

It does remind one of another great physician the world is slow to recognize -- Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. Note the experience of the Samaritans in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, especially verse 42: "He is indeed the Savior of the world."

Very brief chronology in memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

1917 -- His artillery officer father was killed in a hunting accident six months before his birth.

1918 -- He was born December 11 in Kislovodsk one year after the Russian Revolution had begun.

1930 -- At age 12 he joined the Young Pioneers and later became a member of the Communist youth organization.

1940 -- He married school friend Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist.

1941 -- He graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math.

1941 -- When Germany attacked Russia he joined the army. 1941 to 1945 - After training in artillery school, he served three years in combat as commander of a reconnaissance artillery battery.

1945 -- At the East Prussian front he was arrested by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency.

1945 to 1953 He served an eight year term in the Soviet prison system in Moscow and in Siberia.

1953 -- He was sent to a desert settlement in Kok-Terek, Kazakhstan for a sentence of perpetual exile.

1953 -- At age 35 he was allowed to go to a cancer clinic in Tashkent for surgery for a malignant tumor.

1956 -- He was free to move from Siberian exile when his sentence of perpetual exile in Kazakhstan was suspended.

1957 -- He remarried Natalia Reshetovskaya (who had divorced him while he was in the prison system) and who now headed a college chemistry department in Ryazan, and a rehabilitation tribunal invalidated his original sentence, naming him "a Soviet patriot."

1956 to 1961 -- He taught high school physics & astronomy in Ryazan, 70 miles south of Moscow.

1962 -- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in Novy Mir (The New World).

1964 -- Khrushchev was deposed by the Soviet politburo.

1967 -- In an open letter to the Congress of the Soviet Writers Union, he urged an end to censorship.

1969 -- The tiny Ryazan branch of the USSR Writers Union expelled him from the Writers Union.

1970 -- He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1974 -- He was arrested, stripped of Soviet citizenship, and deported to West Germany.

1976 -- He moved from to the town of Cavendish, Vermont.

1978 -- He gave the Commencement Address, "A World Split Apart," at Harvard University.

1994 -- He and his family returned to Russia traveling east to west by train through Siberia to Moscow.

1998 -- He regarded this year as a very low point of Russia's leadership and recent history.

2008 -- He died in Moscow, Sunday, August 3, at the age of 89.