Monday, August 4, 2008

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Takes Final Bow


Rest in peace, Solzhenitsyn.
The brave author, also a Nobel Prize winner, suffered two decades of harsh exile as a result of his writings on the absurdities and tormented life journeys of many Russians under the Stalinist regime. Solzhenitsyn himself is an incredible example of someone who underwent "soul-crunching" persecutions and yet survived.
He died at the age of 89.
A bit from the Times feature today says:
"Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”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 Chekhov."
Read more here.
graph per ny times

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

RIP!
Amazing story.

Anonymous said...

adversity makes a good writer great.

Anonymous said...

Cool article today on the Herald Tribune. Apparently many young Russians didn't know Solzhenitsyn.... Wow!
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/04/europe/russia.php