This story, while a little long for the average Facebook post, is a testament to the power of the Storyteller. Thanks to David Paul Godbout for sharing it with me, and, as always, reminding me that we Storytellers, and our work, matter. ************************************************************************ In 1945, as Soviet Communism was falling like a cloud over Russia and Eastern Europe, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing ill of Stalin in a private letter with a friend and was thrown in a USSR concentration camp for eight years. From that point forward, Solzhenitsyn cycled through the Soviet “gulags” and in and out of exile, using the stories he gained from his experiences to battle Soviet tyranny. From his stay in a concentration camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan, he created his first major work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In the same camp he contracted a brain tumor that almost killed him and served later as the basis for his novel Cancer Ward. Initially Solzhenitsyn’s writings were given explicit approval by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. But after Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn was denied further Soviet publication rights and increasingly became a high-profile enemy of the political class in the country he still called home. His writings told the stories of Soviet Communism, building a consistent narrative of the events in that country while simultaneously marking his own arduous journey through exile and the prison camps. Eventually Solzhenitsyn released the monumental work that would win him the Nobel Prize in literature and bring many Western elites to even starker opposition to the Soviet system—The Gulag Archipelago. A three-volume work based on historical research, Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the prison camps, and interviews with 227 other former prisoners, The Gulag Archipelago was a literary colossus that elevated Solzhenitsyn to the status of martyr and finally stripped away the flawed moral authority of the Soviet system. *** Solzhenitsyn—the storyteller and the story—had done what the economists and philosophers had failed to do: he sucked away the moral appeal of Communism by showing the evil and depredation inherent in the system. Flannery O’Connor once commented: When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. - How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from Historys Greatest Communicator, by Joe Carter and John Coleman
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 23:10:35 +0000
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