Solzhenitsyn is not only a critic of Russia and Bolshevism but of the modern age itself. What does it matter if that critique proceeds from presuppositions different from mine?… Solzhenitsyn speaks from another tradition and this, for me, is impressive: his voice is not modern but ancient. It is an ancientness tempered in the modern world. His ancientness is that of the old Russian Christianity, but it is a Christianity which has passed through the central experience of our century—the dehumanization of the totalitarian concentration camps—and has emerged intact and strengthened. If history is the testing ground, Solzhenitsyn has passed the test. His example is not intellectual or political nor even, in the current sense of the word, moral. We have to use an even older word, a word which still retains a religious overtone—a hint of death and sacrifice: witness. In a century of false testimonies, a writer becomes the witness to man….
The Gulag Archipelago isn't a book of political philosophy but a work of history; more precisely, it is a witnessing—in the old sense of the word: the martyrs are witnesses…. (p. 7)
Octavio Paz, "Dust after Mud: Considering Solzhenitsyn" (originally published in Plural 30, March 1974), translated by Michael Schmidt, in PN Review (© PN Review 1976), Vol. 4, No. 1, 1976, pp. 5-11.
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