And Now for Something Completely Different

That last post was inspired from a New York Times editorial on Sunday about the GOP candidates and the possibility of their defeat and I was feeling particularly cynical, so I wrote it as if one of them were speaking honestly and frankly.

And now, as my title states, for something different.

There are now three people that I admire, and one of them is actually alive, though I am not sure for how long, for he is an old man and has endured much.

The first is Charles Darwin for standing up to religious authorties (he was a pious man) when he found similiarities between the finches in the Galapagos. Since the beginning, those who have learned biology from schizophrenics (and those schizophrenics themselves) have tried to stop the spreading of his idea. Mr Darwin, I admire you for opening the way for science and "secularism" to overcome religious ignorance and tyranny. Psychologists are now studying the roots of morality and the evolution of the brain.

The second is a largely unknown Russian author by the name of Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of WE, who lived in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. He stayed true to his ideas and resisted the Bolshevik intrusion into the artistic and literary world, even as his colleagues, who were his friends previously, denounced and betrayed him. Strangely, Stalin himself granted Zamyatin permission to leave, and he settled where most authors have been known to go, Paris.

The third person is one I've recently learned of by the name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [pronounced Sols-hen-eet-sin], also lived in Russia for nearly his entire life (and has returned as of 13 years ago). He spent time in a Stalinist Gulag and battled with cancer in the Soviet Union as well. Khruschev, Stalin's successor, used Solzhenitsyn for political gain with his novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he won the Nobel Prize for, among other novels such as Cancer Ward and The First Circle. Unfortunately, he declined to receive it until five years afterwards, when the Soviet authorities exiled him. Some consider him to be a historian, John Keegan cites him in his book, The First World War, but in 1980, he expressed diappointment that most of the analyses of his work were political in nature, not focusing on their literary value. I wonder if this is still true?