This would have been more timely of a post, but my monitor is almost kaput. I can barely see what I'm writing. But I wanted to mark the passing of one of the most influential men of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn just didn't survive the Gulag, he made it known to the world what the Communists and Stalin were doing to crush the spirit of the individual. His most famous book, The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973, was a dagger in the side of the USSR. It is a painful and brilliant breakdown of what he sadly called, "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System." Unfortunately the sewage were human beings. Anyone with nostalgia for the USSR or Che or Mao just needs to read this book and see what an "Idea" can lead to. If fiction based on fact is more up your alley his best is the novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
I could go on, but the monitor is hurting my eyes. I'll leave you with three additional articles written about him upon his death and a link to his famous/infamous Harvard address.
An Icon of His Age by The Economist
Stronger than the Gulag by Anne Applebaum
The Man who Kept on Writing by Christopher Hitchens
A World Split Apart by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, June 8th 1978
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