Alexander Solzhenitsyn at a press conference in November 1974.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died last night, aged 89.
"..a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been."
"In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned President Gerald Ford to avoid seeing Solzhenitsyn. "Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents," Kissinger wrote in a memo. "Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn's views of the United States and its allies." Ford followed the advice."In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn said that Russians' view of the West as a "knight of democracy" had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called "a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals." He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy "is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet."
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Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."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.
Over the next five decades, Solzhenitsyn's fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" and historical works like "The Gulag Archipelago."
"Gulag" was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Solzhenitsyn's calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times."
The rest of Michael T Kaufman's article may be read here:
www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/04/arts/04solzhenitsynB.php
One of his last books, “Two Hundred Years Together” has still not yet been translated into English. Not for the first time on this blog the Angry Cheese wonders why? And not for the last time asks if it will be, and when exactly?
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