I remember Solzhenitsyn coming to the West and thinking the end of the Soviet Union was near -- I was wrong by a decade or so but he proved that, sometimes, words are weapons.
Nobel laureate, novelist and chronicler of the Russian gulag Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of a heart ailment earlier today. The Russian literary giant was 89.
From the International Herald Tribune:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful literary works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.
Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.
Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.
More here:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2008/08/03/russian-dissident-novelist-alexander-solzhenitsyn-dies-at-89.aspx
James Morton
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