by Marcello Veneziani
«All beginnings are infinitely difficult, when the simple word must move the inert boulder of matter. But there is no other way if all matter is no longer yours, it is no longer ours. Even a scream can cause an avalanche in the mountains". As a boy these words of Alexander Solgenitsyn they encouraged me to think that the task of waking up the world was not impossible. I think back today, just one hundred years after his birth and ten after his death, with moved amazement at Solzhenitsyn's cry and the avalanche he had created. After his complaint, the world learned about the gulag archipelago, then the Pope who came from the communist East was elected, then Gorbachev started perestroika, then the Berlin Wall fell and finally communism collapsed. I won't say that that cry caused that immense seismic swarm; but in the beginning there was the word, the fragile, defenseless words of a Russian dissident who had experienced and described that horror ordeal first hand. Not just him, but he was certainly the most sensational case. I was heartened to think of the words, the ideas, the culture, they are not useless; sometimes, they move mountains...
In '48 the Russian writer, already a highly decorated captain in war, he had been detained for three years for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend while valiantly fighting against Russia's enemies. But he hadn't ended up in the gulag yet. He then writes “He loves the revolution!”: it is testimony to the end of the revolutionary dream, but it's not yet waking up in a nightmare. It is the harbinger of hell seen through the eyes of a young idealist, Gleb Nerzin, alter ego of the writer; but there is still the freshness of a young man who continues to hope in life, he doesn't know that a terrible journey awaits him from which he will miraculously emerge alive. The novel remained unfinished. Then, after the gulag years, Solzhenitsyn will be recognized in the world, consecrated in 1970 dal Nobel Prize, loved in Russia, where he returned after an unhappy period in "Western materialism", as he said, in America. Then the return to the glorious solitude of nature, his meetings with the powerful and with Putin, who received him a couple of times in his dacha. His, the flag of Great Mother Russia, spiritual and religious, son of tradition and martyr of communism who meets a man of power from the Soviet apparatus but determined to reawaken Russia's tradition and patriotic pride.

The last years of his life they were characterized by widespread and annoyed oblivion, especially in the West. Half of it was due to those who wanted to erase Solzhenitsyn's communist past, and half due to those who wanted to remove Solgenityn's criticism of the sated and desperate West, spiritually no better than the Soviet Union. Sometimes the fanatical Westerners of the time were the same fanatical communists of yesterday, and Solzhenitsyn had twice been annoying and unbearable to them, because it recalled their failed journey from one materialism to another; a repressive one, hungry and messianic, the other opulent, permissive and nihilistic.
 Solzhenitsyn's moralism against the permissive degradation of the West was considered unbearable in the West. And then his patriotic spirit had fueled the national-religious movements of Russia and the ex-Soviet East; the victim of the gulag risked being thought of as a bad teacher. Yet Solzhenitsyn himself did not fail to criticize the fanatical drift of pan-Russian national-imperialism.
Solzhenitsyn lived the last years of his life in a gilded prison, in a muffled gulag, revered but forgotten by the world. The persecution of the gulags gave way to oblivion. Deafening silence. They made it a living monument, to embalm him alive and never hear his voice again.
MV, The weather 10 December 2018
source: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/solgenitsyn-dal-gulag-alloblio/