8/08/2008

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 exposÄ— 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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