The Salt of the Earth

The events of this last weekend gave me cause to eulogize two great men. Both were very different in many ways and yet surprisingly similar. One man was famous throughout the world and the other known in the much smaller circle in which he practiced his art. The death of the former happened on Sunday, while the latter departed more than a decade ago. The two men, however, shared unique qualities of virtue and character that were immediately recognizable to the many lives they had touched. They were "the salt of the earth."


"This World Was Lucky to See Him Born."

I was invited to play in the 4th Billy Colias Memorial Chess Congress last weekend. Apprehensively, I accepted. It had been at least fifteen years since my last foray into competitive chess. Having made the transition from tournament player to chess coach/teacher many years ago, I was rusty to say the least. My tremendous respect for the organizer of the tournament and my great love for Billy made my participation a fait accompli.

Billy Colias was a Midwestern chess master of amazing ability, by far the most talented in the region. He loved the game with the passion of an artist who had no choice, but to create. And create he did! Steadily, constantly, assuredly, like a great tidal force, he became a stronger and stronger player. Undoubtedly, he would have ascended to the greatest of heights! But, it was not to be. The artist who devoted his life to the struggle of the chess board, was simultaneously fighting a great personal battle with cancer. Billy beat the cancer, but the chemotherapy left his internal organs in a very weak state. After years of battling with incredible courage, he finally succumbed at age twenty-seven.

Billy's considerable talent for the game, though impressive, was exceeded by his talent for living. Among the many virtues he possessed, his kindness impressed me the most. In the chess circles he frequented, Billy never equated a player's talent with their worth as an individual. He extended himself to the Grandmaster and Class E player, alike. His kindness was actually an extension of his humility. For Billy, self-importance based on one's chess prowess was a ridiculous proposition. Former World Champion, Emmanuel Lasker, aptly pointed out: "In life, we are all duffers." Billy Colias was the rare exception to that rule.


"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

When I arrived home from the tournament, I was shocked by the news of the death of another man who influenced my life greatly: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. To say the name is to immediately think of great literary talent. His books and ideas have changed the world, helped to topple an empire. As much an impact as they had on me, it was his icon of courage which inspired me the most.

As a young man, Solzhenitsyn embraced doctrinaire Marxism . He even read Das Kapital on his honeymoon! While serving as the Captain of an artillery battery on the Eastern Front in WWII, Solzhenitsyn's life would change forever. He dared to criticize Stalin in his private correspondence --being a committed Communist was not the same as being a committed Stalinist-- was arrested, and sentenced to the vast constellation of forced labor camps he would later make infamous through his writings. The years that followed changed Solzhenitsyn. He recognized the hypocrisy of the Soviet system and eventually embraced Christianity: "first comes the fight for survival, then the discovery of life, then God."

Solzhenitsyn's literary star rose with the ascendancy of Krushchev and his formal denunciation of Stalin. When One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made its debut, Krushchev encouraged all the delegates at the plenary meeting of the Central Committee to read it! A few years later, Krushchev was removed from power and the succeeding hardliners did not have much use for the popular writer. Solzhenitsyn, however, refused to acquiesce. On November 30th, 1966,in front of an audience of five hundred people, he exhibited a moment of peerless courage when he openly defied the KGB:

There is a certain organization that has no obvious claim to tutelage over the arts, that you may think has no business at all supervising literature --but that does these things. This organization took away my novel and my archive...Even so, I said nothing, but went on working quietly. However, they then made use of excerpts from my papers, taken out of context, to launch a campaign of defamation against me...What can I do about it? Only defend myself! So here I am!

When The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in 1973, this was too much for the Soviet authorities. Solzhenitsyn was exiled and eventually settled in Vermont. True to himself he criticized the excesses in Western Society with the same integrity he condemned the injustice's of his motherland. He triumphantly returned to Russia in 1994.

A Final Thought

I knew Billy Colias, shook hands with him, played chess with him, talked with him, and laughed with him. I never met Alexander Solzhenitsyn or was even in the same room with him. However, both men have affected me personally. I will always see their smiling faces and a gesture of their hands beckoning me forward, exhorting me to have courage in the face of adversity.