Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89....

[North Pole Resident]

Just in......

August 4, 2008, 1:00

Nobel prize winner Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/06Sv7D6bd2dj6/340x.jpg

Russian novelist, dramatist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. He passed away in the early hours of Monday in Moscow.
It is believed he died of a stroke.

Source: http://www.russiatoday.ru/news/news/28418


Autobiography

I was born at Kislovodsk on 11th December, 1918. My father had studied philological subjects at Moscow University, but did not complete his studies, as he enlisted as a volunteer when war broke out in 1914. He became an artillery officer on the German front, fought throughout the war and died in the summer of 1918, six months before I was born. I was brought up by my mother, who worked as a shorthand-typist, in the town of Rostov on the Don, where I spent the whole of my childhood and youth, leaving the grammar school there in 1936. Even as a child, without any prompting from others, I wanted to be a writer and, indeed, I turned out a good deal of the usual juvenilia. In the 1930s, I tried to get my writings published but I could not find anyone willing to accept my manuscripts. I wanted to acquire a literary education, but in Rostov such an education that would suit my wishes was not to be obtained. To move to Moscow was not possible, partly because my mother was alone and in poor health, and partly because of our modest circumstances. I therefore began to study at the Department of Mathematics at Rostov University, where it proved that I had considerable aptitude for mathematics.

READ MORE -- http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-autobio.html

[quirk]

Good riddance to the fascist.

[quirk]

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89.

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

After returning to Russia, Solzhenitsyn wrote several polemics on Russian history and identity.

His son Stepan was quoted by one Russian news agency as saying his father died of heart failure, while another agency quoted literary sources as saying he had suffered a stroke.

He died in his home in the Moscow area, where he had lived with his wife Natalya, at 2345 local time (1945 GMT) on Sunday, Stepan told Itar-Tass.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, a Kremlin spokesperson said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th Century Russia".

"His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky," he said in a statement.

Prisoner, patient, writer

Solzhenitsyn served as a Soviet artillery officer in World War II and was decorated for his courage but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.

He spent the next eight years in the Soviet prison system, or Gulag, before being internally exiled to Kazakhstan, where he was successfully treated for stomach cancer.

Publication in 1962 of the novella Denisovich, an account of a day in a Gulag prisoner's life, made him a celebrity during the post-Stalin political thaw.

However, within a decade, the writer awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature was out of favour again for his work, and was being harassed by the KGB secret police.

In 1973, the first of the three volumes of Archipelago, a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of its prison and labour camps, was published in the West.

Its publication sparked a furious backlash in the Soviet press, which denounced him as a traitor.

Early in 1974, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

Moral voice

He settled in Vermont, in the US, where he completed the other two volumes of Archipelago.

While living there as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the West.

Scathing of Boris Yeltsin's brand of democracy, he did not return to Russia immediately upon the collapse of the USSR in 1992, unlike other exiles.

His homecoming in 1994 was a dramatic affair as he travelled in slowly by land from the Russian Far East.

Solzhenitsyn's latter works, which included essays on Russia's future, courted controversy.

In 2000, his last major work Two Hundred Years Together examined the position of Jews in Russian society and their role in the Revolution.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7540038.stm

[North Pole Resident]

Russian writer Solzhenitsyn laid to rest in Moscow

06/ 08/ 2008

http://img.rian.ru/images/11574/57/115745731.jpg

http://img.rian.ru/images/11560/55/115605553.jpg

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)



MOSCOW, August 6 (RIA Novosti) - The body of Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest at Moscow's Donskoi monastery on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by hundreds of people.

The Nobel laureate and former dissident was buried at the monastery, which is the final resting place of many writers, poets and historians, after a night-long vigil and a morning funeral service at the monastery's cathedral.

President Dmitry Medvedev, who attended the service, offered condolences to Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalia, his three sons and their families.

Other top officials, cultural figures, scientists and hundreds of ordinary people came to say their farewells to the writer, who died of heart failure late Sunday at the age of 89.

In scenes reminiscent of a state funeral, a military band played and three salvoes were fired at the end of the burial ceremony. The grave was covered with flowers and wreaths from well-wishers.

Thousands paid their last tribute to the writer on Tuesday as his body lay in state in the Russian Academy of Sciences. A military guard of honor stood by his open casket before a Russian flag and a large portrait of him.
Best known as the author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, dreadful accounts of Stalinist prison life, Solzhenitsyn fought in WWII, spent eight years in labor camps, survived cancer while still in prison, and lived abroad in forced exile for 20 years.

The Russian Orthodox Church leader, Patriarch Alexy II, said in a message read out at the funeral service that Solzhenitsyn "had done his outmost to tell people the truth about the tragic and yet heroic past of our country, testifying the truth and suffering for it."

Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He died at his home near Moscow.

The Kremlin announced later Wednesday that the president had ordered a street in Moscow be named after the writer and scholarships in his name be paid to university students as of 2009 "as a token of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's considerable contribution to Russian culture and an imperishable effect of his oeuvre."

The governor's office in Solzhenitsyn's hometown of Kislovodsk in southern Russia said local authorities would open a museum dedicated to the writer.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080806/115844555.html

[quirk]

The Russian Orthodox Church leader, Patriarch Alexy II, said in a message read out at the funeral service that Solzhenitsyn "had done his outmost to tell people the truth about the tragic and yet heroic past of our country, testifying the truth and suffering for it."

NPR, out of interest I am wondering what your opinion on the Soviet regime especially the what Anna Louise Strong called the "Stalin era". Sometimes you seem to be critical of it and sometimes you seem to uphold it. Maybe I am rong but could you clarify the situation?