SOLZHENITSYN: His Pen and His Passing. By Uncle Monty.

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SOLZHENITSYN: His Pen and His Passing.

By Uncle Monty.
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Although I tried very hard, I never did get to meet and
photograph, has I had so wished, the world-famous

Russian dissident writer Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn

during his years of political exile in America.
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The closest I ever got to him was to speak at length

on the telephone with his wife, Natalya, who told me

he was refusing all media interviews and photo sessions

and enquiring visitors of any kind to his then American

homestead at, I think it was, Cavendish, Vermont. I

was prepared, of course, to travel at a moments notice

to visit and photograph the towering figure thus thrown

out of his very own beloved country for his extraordinary

writings and exposė of the diabolical Stalinist Regime

and the dreadful and ruthless Soviet Union.
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When I telephoned Natalya Solzhenitsyn, it
was just weeks after her husband’s 1978 Harvard

Commencement Speech in which he warned the West of

its own cultural downfall and moral demise. Solzhenitsyn

wasn’t afraid to bite the hand that fed him, West or no

West. And, that he criticised only like he could do so and

so he did with the West at his feet and at his home-

land rejected and evicted as Russia's pre-eminent

writer and intellectual of the 20th century. If there

was ever a writer that I so wanted to meet and
photograph it was without a shadow of a doubt the

great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. So forget for the

moment say Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie.

AIS was the man. If I could write only a tenth of

his extraordinary ability, I could then humbly

call myself only a "fair" writer at best.

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn's pen and passing

was marked at his funeral at Moscow’s 16th century

Russian Orthodox Donskoi Monastery just the day

before yesterday with mourners that included the new
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who interrupted

his holiday to attend the writer's burial that had earlier

been consented by the Orthodox Patriarch Aleksei II.

Although Russia's ex-president and now Prime Minister

Vladimir Putin didn't attend Solzhenitsyn’s very religious

and orthodox funeral, he did pay homage to him by visiting

his lying-in-state at Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences.

Ironically, Putin as then a KGB agent, had helped send the

dissident writer to the Soviet Gulag at which Solzhenitsyn

was later to write about in his monumental work and world

best seller called: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956.

An Experiment in Literary Investigation, v-xi.

Translated by Thomas P. Whitney.
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In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel

Prize in Literature and The Templeton Prize in

1983. For me personally, had I got to photo-

graph him at his Vermont homestead, I would

have had a photographic scoop at that time for

sure. I am sure, too, that many other news

photographers like me had tried to do the same

thing by calling in the hope that photographic

consent would be given. It was not to be either

for them or for me. But, with or without my aim

to make images of Solzhenitsyn, I would have

still jumped fast at the chance to meet him per-

sonally and to listen to his wisdom and intellect

that few others, in my opinion, possessed at his

astonishing level. His death is a grave loss not only

to Mother Russia, but to the world of dissident and

oppressed writers. Sadly, too, Solzhenitsyn lived

beyond his time at age 89 at his beloved Russia at

where many of his fellow countryman and women

viewed him more like a relic and not a living liter-

ary treasure and genius that surely Aleksandr I.

Solzhenitsyn was. And, will always be to those of us,

both inside and outside of his native Russia, who

respect great writers no matter where they come

from or by whatever language and means they

may scribe and slave under.

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A deeply religious man, "Solzhenitsyn

served only God," according to his friend and

fellow writer Ekaterina Markova, as reported of

her by Tony Halpin, the Moscow correspondent

for The Times. She added: "Not the Government,

not democracy, not even America. Only God (did

he serve), that's why he was a free person." Bravo.

Let this great man now rest in great peace for he

has served his country and the world as a shining

beacon against all political and all governmental

oppression and tyranny against the people.
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With condolence, Uncle Monty.

+Hieromartyr Sergius, 1937-2oo8.

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