Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89
Posted on August 4, 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died. The Nobel Prize winning author chronicled the labor camps of Stalinist Russia and spent eight years in the gulag. His writings got him imprisoned, tortured and exiled from his homeland, although he eventually returned after the fall of Communism. He died of heart failure in Moscow, according to his son.
Russian literary giant Alexander Solzhenitsyn, opened the eyes of the world to the brutality of Stalin's labour camps with searing writings that brought him the wrath of the Soviet authorities and years of persecution. He went from outcast to hero, in a life whose suffering and triumph reflected the upheavals of 20th century Russia itself.Solzhenitsyn received an award from then president Vladimir Putin, but continued to criticize the New Russia for its corruption and lack of true democracy. His words will live on long after him.Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, was a driven chronicler of Russian history, drawing on his blackest moments in dictator Josef Stalin's camps for his most memorable works. In a life of extraordinary swings of fortune, he served with the Red Army, endured eight years in the Soviet Gulag, beat cancer and in 1970, still hounded by the communist authorities, won the Nobel Prize for literature. He spent 20 years of unhappy and forced exile in the West whose materialistic values he never ceased to denounce.
By the time he made a hero's return to Russia in 1994, it was to a challenging new country that -- to his regret -- was espousing those same values and which he barely recognised. The sometimes Messianic figure, with the mien of a biblical prophet, was an icon of resistance to communism in the Cold War.