“Gulag Archipelago” Author Dies In Russia

Carol J. Williams
LA Times
Monday, Aug 4, 2008

Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of communist repression, died Sunday. He was 89.

His son, Stephan Solzhenitsyn, told the Associated Press that his father died of heart failure in Moscow.

The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia’s nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile – only to be as distressed by communism’s damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned from his Vermont refuge to a dramatically changed Russia in 1994 but deemed it a moral ruin after a monthslong odyssey to become re-acquainted with the country that had denounced him as a traitor, stripped him of citizenship and expelled him in 1974.

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Hailed as Russia’s greatest living writer, the author of more than two dozen books – in addition to commentaries, poems, plays and film scripts – won back his citizenship and the respect of his fellow Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although his books were best-sellers in the West, only “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published first in his homeland.

Other major works include a memoir, “The Oak and the Calf,” and “August 1914,” the first volume of a monumental history of 20th century Russia.

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