Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89
Russian literary giant and freedom fighter Alexander Solzhenitsyn died:
The Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died aged 89, according to the Interfax news agency.
The agency said he died of a stroke, although his son Stepan Solzhenitsyn said his father died of heart failure. The author had suffered from ill heath, including high blood pressure, in recent years.
Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in the Second World War but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labour camps, cancer and persecution under the Soviet regime.
His experience of the network of labour camps was vividly described in his work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
His key works, including “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature prize.
London’s Telegraph declares Solzhenitsyn the “Voice of the Gulag.” The obituary goes on:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89 was not only a great, but a passionately committed writer – he believed it was his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia’s 20th-century experience for posterity.
In his lecture of acceptance of the Nobel prize for Literature in 1970, Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
Those words succinctly encapsulated his literary creed. In a country where autocratic leadership had long obliged the populace to seek more inspiring government, Solzhenitsyn, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Akhmatova before him, became a vital source of spiritual succour to his huge circle of readers.
Godspeed, Alexander.
“Nobel Prize Winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies Aged 89″
UPDATE: Here are some reactions from around the blogosphere:
- Ilya Somin reminds us the man has his flaws.
- Reliapundit
- Little Miss Attila
I remember reading “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”…and being enthralled by Solzhenitsyn’s writing style….the world has lost a great author indeed.