My tributes too to the great mind of letters.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7540821.stm

Tributes to writer Solzhenitsyn

World figures have paid tribute to Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a day after his death aged 89. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lauded him as one of the first to speak up about Stalin's regime, and France's Nicolas Sarkozy hailed his courage. The author, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, will lie in state in Moscow on Tuesday, according to Russian media. His funeral will take place the next day, the Interfax news agency said. He will be buried at Moscow's historic Donskoi Monastery, Russian media quoted church officials as saying. The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich died of heart failure on Sunday at his home near Moscow, his son said. Solzhenitsyn had returned to Russia in 1994, following two decades in exile in the West. 'Heavy loss' News of the Nobel laureate's death prompted tributes in Russia and around the world. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th-Century Russia" and praised his intransigence and ideals in the face of personal danger. Former French leader Jacques Chirac hailed Solzhenitsyn as a great writer and exceptional historian who had provided "a sharp and accurate view on the tragedies of 20th-Century totalitarianism". He went on: "Russia today lost a great fighter for truth, who worked to reconcile the Russians with their past. The world loses a figure of freedom." Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, a Kremlin spokesperson said. HAVE YOUR SAY A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the single book which showed me the power of literature to change the world   Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described Solzhenitsyn's death as a "heavy loss for Russia". US President George W Bush sent his condolences to the author's family. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and whose reforms helped end communism, said the writer had played a key role in undermining Stalin's totalitarian regime. His works "changed the consciousness of millions of people", Mr Gorbachev said. "He was one of the first to talk about the inhumane Stalinist regime and about the people who experienced it but were not broken." 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. 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, but made a dramatic homecoming in 1994. Solzhenitsyn's latter works, which included essays on Russia's future, also stirred 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.

Times abituary:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4458713.ece

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: indomitable Russian writer

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn redefined Russian modern literature. The publication — in the Soviet Union — of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) not only exemplified the all-too-brief period of the Khrushchev thaw, but it also became an international event. His The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle exposed the institutionalised brutality of the Soviet system and provoked widespread debate about individual morality and personal responsibility — a debate both vital and unfamiliar in a society so accustomed to unthinking acts of collective brutality.

Solzhenitsyn wrote about subjects rarely tackled in Soviet or Russian literature, such as the uprising by prisoners against the authorities in The Tanks Know the Truth, and he did so in a vivid language permeated with the slang and vocabulary that developed in that vast network of penal labour and prison camps which has come to be known as the Gulag.

Post-communist Russians, caught in the turmoil of political change and the scramble for material wealth, hailed Solzhenitsyn’s lasting greatness as the author of such works as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward (1968) and The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes; 1973-78), which had for the first time spelt out in public the horrors of the Soviet system. And although post-perestroika Russians found his continued moralising on the fate of the nation an embarrassment and his authority waned after 1991, interest in him picked up again towards the end of his life.

During his last years a colossal project to publish all his works in one collection was undertaken. Although as time passed his position became increasingly nationalist and patriotic, for instance in his support for military action in Chechnya, he remained an iconic figure to Western liberals of a certain age.

Solzhenitsyn ranks alongside such great visionary authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the political exile Alexander Herzen, who found moral fault with the human condition. Disappointment at the state of the West drove each of these writers back home with a new passion to define a superior Russian way.

Solzhenitsyn’s novels exemplify the realism, moral discernment and triumph over suffering that many associate particularly with Russian literature. For some he was a kind of alternative government, directing Russians to reflect on their own participation or acquiescence in the monstrous inhumanities of Stalin’s terror and tyranny.

He spoke for the army of otherwise unmentioned dead: workers, peasants, old Bolsheviks, minority nations, intellectuals who passed through the camps and prisons, and their families.

His insistence that the whole truth about this period must be told as the precondition for a healthier future brought him into conflict — and later into collision — with the Soviet bureaucracy. He sometimes seemed to be waging war single handedly against the massed power of the Soviet State.

But his writing was always more than a political or even a moral campaign in one country. As with Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn asked by what morality should a man be guided, how should he live; he rallied against all forms of what he saw as spiritual darkness.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born at Kislovodsk in the central Caucasus in 1918. His father had died just before he was born, after serving in the First World War — a subject to which Solzhenitsyn would return in his historical novel August 1914.

Solzhenitsyn was brought up in Rostov-on-Don, and he studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. Shortly after he graduated in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and he was called up into the Red Army. By 1943 he was the commander of a reconnaissance division in the artillery, and as the Russian front line advanced he participated in some of the heaviest fighting of the war, reaching eastern Prussia by the first months of 1945. There Solzhenitsyn, already twice decorated for bravery, emerged from the fierce battle for Königsberg only to be arrested by the NKVD and charged under the Soviet Criminal Code with having made derogatory remarks about Stalin in his correspondence.

He was sentenced to eight years’ “deprivation of liberty”, passed through the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, then Mavrino, a prison research institute on the outskirts of the city where prisoners with technical knowledge worked in relatively good conditions, and finally, after refusing to co-operate with the research programme, he was sent to a labour camp.

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A moaning, by the walls half muffled:
The mother's wounded, still alive.
The little daughter's on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It's all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! * A tooth for a tooth!
The mother begs, "Tote mich, Soldat!"

(From PRUSSIAN NIGHTS)

A moaning, by the walls half muffled:
The mother's wounded, still alive.
The little daughter's on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It's all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! * A tooth for a tooth!
The mother begs, "Tote mich, Soldat!"

(From PRUSSIAN NIGHTS)

Letshavefun,

Thanks for the piece.  Have never read Prussian Nights, might do in due course.

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http://www.nepalitimes.com.np/issue/2008/08/8/Tribute/15120

The Gulag chronicler
Two sides in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

NINA KHRUSHCHEVA

MOSCOW?Prophets, it is said, are supposed to be without honour in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident and once-exiled author of the Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, receiving what amounts to a state funeral. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was chief mourner.

So, even in death, Alexander Solzhenitsyn will, it seems, remain a force to be reckoned with. But will he be a force in keeping with the liberating vistas of his greatest works?

Sadly, art in Russia is always used to reinforce the narcissism of power. Solzhenitsyn was used in this way twice. The paradox is that, in the Soviet era, his art was used, briefly, as a force for liberation, because Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in order to buttress his anti-Stalin thaw.

In today's supposedly free and democratic Russia, however, Solzhenitsyn is idealised for his nationalism and Orthodox messianism, his contempt for the West's supposed decadence, all messages that Putin's regime proclaims loudly and daily.

The old Soviet iconography has broken down completely. Despite heroic efforts, not even Putin could restore Lenin, Stalin, and the old Soviet pantheon. Yet the Kremlin understands that something is needed to replace them as Russia adapts to its new oil-fueled autocracy. Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous and heroic dissidents of the Soviet era, now seems certain to become a towering figure in the iconography of Putinism.

For Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the gulag system enforced by the KGB, the desire to see Russia as a great nation, its eternal spirit superior to the West's vulgar materialism, found him in old age supporting an ex-KGB strongman. Putin once said that there is no such thing as an ex-KGB man and sees the Soviet Union's collapse as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of modern times. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn accepted Putin as a 'good dictator'.

It is a sad testament to Russia's current mindset that it is Solzhenitsyn the anti-modernist crank who is being remembered, not Solzhenitsyn the towering foe of Soviet barbarism and mendacity. Today, his writing is seen as buttressing the state, not individual freedom. Works such as The Red Wheel series of novels, a tedious account of the end of Imperial Russia and the creation of the USSR or his last book A Hundred Years Together on the history of Russian-Jewish coexistence, seem backward, preachy, conservative, unenlightened, at times even anti-Semitic. They smack off Solzhenitsyn's own grim authoritarianism.

Both Putin and Khrushchev sought to use Solzhenitsyn for their own purposes. Putin vowed to revive the moral fibre of the Russians, their glory and international respect. Under him, Khrushchev Solzhenitsyn's work was used to liberate the country from the grip of Stalinism. Khrushchev knew that he was undermining the entire Soviet era up to that point. But, with Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev lost no time in restoring orthodoxy and purging books that threatened the Party's reputation. Solzhenitsyn was banned, driven first underground and then into exile.

One lesson of the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe is the value of having truly democratic-minded figures lead the escape from communism. Poland had Lech Welesa; Czechoslovakia, V?clav Havel. Both kept their countries calm during wrenching transitions. Russia, sadly, had no one with the moral authority to soothe people's passions. Only Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov came near to Walesa and Havel in terms of moral authority. But Sakharov was dead by the time communism collapsed, and Solzhenitsyn's ideas were too conservative, too tied to Russian nationalism, for him to become a symbol of democracy in a multi-national Soviet Union.

The tragedy of Solzhenitsyn is that although he played a mighty role in liberating Russia from totalitarianism, he had nothing to say to ordinary Russians after their liberation, except to chastise them. Yet perhaps one day we Russians will escape our false dreams, and when that day comes, the heroic Solzhenitsyn, the Solzhenitsyn who could never surrender or be corrupted, will be restored to us. But it is now that we need that olzhenitsyn most.

Project Syndicate

Nina Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at The New School in New York

he was a victim of propaganda war between east and west. I remember voice of america was chanting a slogan how all these soviet intellectuals wanted to settle in america for freedom and was somehow true after seeing the trend. But he was the rare case where he denounce the sytem in US equivoacally as he did in USSR. His Haverd speech was booed by many participants  yet was a pinnacle conforming who ( east vs. west ) was rightous and  as much as he was welcomed & noised  after arrival in US as a propoganda war ( freedom blha blah) , his departure from this country was the most kept secret ( or lip tighted) from the western government or the free media. In another word, as much as his arrival at US was a big bang news his departure with reason was not for these western news gorrillas. Anyway if your're curious what part he was most disgusted in US ? it was pornography readily available everywhere here in the name of freedom.   RIP great soul !!!