Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed away last summer, 30 years after a controversial graduation speech at Harvard in June of 1978. Solzhenitsyn’s long 90 year life was a fascinating journey taking many turns. Born in the area of southern Russia known as the Caucasus, Solzhenitsyn was trained early as a mathematician, began a career as a writer, and served in the Red Army during World War II. In 1945 he was arrested by the Communist government based on negative comments about Stalin in intercepted personal letters he had written. He served eight years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, harsh experiences that shaped the context for his later novels, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He eventually settled in the United States until returning to Russia in 1994 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

As one who has given a Baccalaureate address before, I know that speaking to graduating seniors (in my case to high school graduates) is a daunting task. First, such occasions are veritable recipes for banality; the temptation to trite advice-giving and strained moralizing is hard to overcome. So I am always interested when among the thousands of such speeches each spring at our nation’s high schools and colleges, someone has managed to make news.