Farewell, Aleksandr

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died. Мир праху его.

Christopher Hitchens, in Slate, writes:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived as if there were such a thing as human dignity.

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.

It's hard to adequately sum up the life of this man. He wasn't what we Americans wanted him to be, and he wasn't what the Russians wanted him to be, either (let alone the Soviets), but he was true to himself and his beliefs. And of course he was a wonderful writer.

Александр Исаевич Солженицын, великий писатель Земли Русской: пусть будет земля тебе пухом.