Why Alexander Solzhenitsyn Matters

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. He was probably the last Great (capital g) writer of our time, meaning that he was the last creative writer of whom I can think who people actually cared about, who actually changed the world, who really thought that art was more than just a means to obtain tenure at Montana's creative-writing workshop and, through this belief, earned a chapter in the history of freedom. This doesn't mean that everything he believed was worthy of emulation; he embraced Vladimir Putin as the restorer of Russia, for instance. This was at best naive and at worst dangerous, but what was important about this outstanding writer was not his present, but rather his past. He was, in many ways, a symbol of it; the last man who would ever proclaim that art could save the world. Ultimately, I don't think that art saved his world, but, in the future, it will always remain something of a consolation.