Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead at age 89. Here's part of the BBC account:

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.

Although he was clearly never happy in the West (where he lived in exile until 1994), his published works (especially Denisovitch and the Gulag Archipelago) opened many eyes to what the Soviet empire was like. I remember how horrified I felt when reading the books (I was about 15 when I started on the first volume of Gulag Archipelago), and some of that chill stays with me even now.

Update: James Lileks pays his respects:

I got all three volumes from the drugstore — which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore — and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

The great brooding man is dead — all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldn't have liked his Russia — autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land — but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. It's a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some.