The Greats of 1918

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at age 89.

When I was working for Russell Kirk in 1993, the good doctor celebrated his 75th birthday in October. In a short span thereafter, I figured out that two other men of import in the 20th century were also born in 1918: Billy Graham and Solzhenitsyn.

Here is Alexander the Great in his own words, from his Nobel Lecture in 1970:

"A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.

Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up TO THAT VERY PLACE, and thus complete the work of all three?

Then what Dostoevsky wrote--"Beauty will save the world"--is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy. After all, he had the gift of seeing much, a man wondrously filled with light."