Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is dead.

Damned fine author.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijDA5bgxiHlTvS_r-SSjskS1Tq1wD92B26IG0

Yes, he was a damned fine author...

How old was he?

I know he was full of years...

Wikipedia is fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

Gulag and Cancer Ward helped make me the Progressive Liberal I am today

I just posted the new BBC link in Latest News.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7540038.stm

I'll ask our priest to add him to the list of the dead whose souls we pray for.

books I read. RIP.

Many outside of the Soviet Union, did not know the full weight of oppression that was going on inside the Soviet Union, were it not for Solzhenitsyen.

He is a writer that helped change Western thought and had implications for the defeat of the Soviet Union.

"Then came the news that Solzhenitsyn was writing a major history of the Jews in Russia. The first volume of Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), covering the period from 1795 to 1916, appeared in 2001; the second volume followed in 2003. According to Solzhenitsyn, the work was intended to give an objective and balanced account of Russian-Jewish relations: "I appeal to both sides -- the Russians and the Jews -- for patient mutual understanding and admission of their own share of sin." This comment seems suspicious in itself, given that, for most of their history in Russia, Jews were victims of systematic oppression and violence. To talk about mutual guilt is a bit like asking blacks to accept their share of blame for Jim Crow.

What does Solzhenitsyn see as the Jews' share of sin? Mainly, their participation in revolutionary activities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then in the Soviet government. He rejects claims that communism in Russia was the result of a Jewish plot but asserts that Jews played a "disproportionate role" in the creation of a terrorist state "insensitive to the Russian people and disconnected from Russian history."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29113.html

"Gulag Archipelago" changed the world.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" changed me.

ditto.

too brilliant to be real, studied Russian which includes of course the cyrillic alphabet to read him in his native tongue.