Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. In 1994, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.





Russians mourn dissident hero Solzhenitsyn

Russians on Monday mourned Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident whose criticism of the tyranny of Soviet rule made him one of the bravest figures of the 20th century.

Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel literature laureate, died of heart failure late on Sunday in his Moscow home. He was 89.

On Monday, a chorus of voices across the world expressed grief at the death of a man whose struggle exposed the horror of Josef Stalin's camps and made him the conscience of Russia.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, described Solzhenitsyn as a “man of unique destiny whose name will remain in Russia's history.”

“He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin's regime with a full voice, and about the people whose lived through this but were not broken,” Gorbachev, told Interfax news agency.

A funeral service will take place at the medieval Donskoi monastery in Moscow on Wednesday and Solzhenitsyn will be buried there later that day in accordance with his will, said a Russian Orthodox church spokesman.

President Dmitry Medvedev and top Russian officials as well as global leaders including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President George W. Bush sent their condolences.

“The death of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn is a heavy loss for the whole of Russia,” said a telegram from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former agent with the KGB security service that led the persecution campaign against Solzhenitsyn.

Long banned from publication, Solzhenitsyn owed his initial fame to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who allowed the publication in 1962 of his “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which described the horrifying routine of labor camp life.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for his work, including “Gulag Archipelago,” a chronicle of his own and thousands of other prison camp experiences.

In his books, he shook consciences by unveiling the dark secrets of the Gulag, the network of prison camps where millions of Russians died during Stalin's purges. Some read and distributed his books underground, fearing state persecution.

In 1974, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany for refusing to keep silent about his country's past. He became an icon of resistance to the totalitarian system from his American home in Vermont.

TRIBUTE IN FLOWERS

In Troitse-Lykovo in the outskirts of Moscow where Solzhenitsyn spent his final years, passers-by paid tribute by tucking flowers into the blue-painted gate of his house.

“It's a great loss for our family. It's also a loss for the country,” his son Stepan told Reuters. “He was always really happy he returned. This is his home.”

Solzhenitsyn refused to return to Russia until after the Soviet Union collapsed, marking his comeback in a long train journey from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Moscow in 1994.

After his return, the post-Soviet leadership paid him great respect. But he became increasingly critical of the state of modern day Russia, denouncing corruption and Western influences in a society that had emerged from 80 years of Soviet rule.

He lived in seclusion outside Moscow, playing no discernible role in Russian political life and rarely appearing in public.

In a bookstore in central Moscow, a selection of his most famous books was put on display beneath a large black-and-white portrait of the author.

Television channels and radio stations ran constant solemn reports on his life but some younger Russians confessed they knew little about his work.

“He is very famous. I'm just starting his works,” said Viktoria Danilova, a 17-year-old in central Moscow. “Unfortunately I haven't read very much yet.”

(Writing by Maria Golovnina; additional reporting by Conor Sweeney, Anatoly Titkin, Valery Stepchenkov; editing by Robert Hart)

Legacy

The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's selected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three published volumes recently took place in Moscow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

Re: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

Did not know much about the man but I had this quote of his hanging in my office at work for a number of years after 911.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

- source:  The Gulag Archipelago (1973)


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