Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , RIP/ A Place of Refuge for Books

The first time I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I may have been about fifteen. It was an old edition, somewhat dog-eared. I think it belonged to my sister, or to one of her friends. It was one of those books that was to be found inexplicably floating around our house, stuffed behind the pile of newspapers - only surfacing when my mother cleared them out at the end of the month after checking to see whether the crosswords in every Sunday paper were complete. Because it was a place of refuge for books. People came by and dropped stray books off, like sad dogs without homes - they seemed to feel that our home was somehow sympathetic to their cause, perhaps much more than they could be. Or because the book in question was "not suitable" for their own families.

Anyway, when I first read it, it was just amusing to me that an author could devote a whole book to one day in one man's life. What an amazing situation, I remember thinking. How much must have happened in that one day for this man. Later when I read through it again, there was the bleakness, the harshness of a camp run by men brought together in the running of a totalitarian state, alongside the hope of other men - men incarcerated by an unreasonable regime.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died last week, at 89. He was unreasonable, intolerant, controversial, brilliant. As a reviewer on NPR said, a hero but a qualified one. I can't recall what the qualification was based on, it is not important to me. The essence of humanism and empathy was offered to my unformed fifteen-year-old mind by a somewhat well-known line from the book:
"How can a man who is warm understand another man, who is freezing?"

There is something very troubling at a basic level in that.

To my mind, the book remains as relevant now as it was then, as relevant as a red light at a level crossing even when the trains are slow and infrequent - and you can see them coming. With the emergence of new regimes and governments across countries in the 21st century, with new names and new places...Mugabe, Putin, Ceaucesceau, Bush...Georgia, Sudan, Iran, Burma. There are new battlefields, new secret places where lives are shut down and locked away, there are the new men in gray (ref: The Russia House, John Le Carre)

And this is from the end:

"A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch....

"Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.

"The three extra days were for leap years."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RIP