Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918 - 2008.

Just hitting the wires in Germany is news that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, has died tonight in Moscow.

Just two weeks ago, the AP's Hillel Italie announced that an "uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English." In 1991, the novel was adapted as a television mini-series that DVD Talk's Preston Jones called a "sprawling, deliciously paranoid Cold War thriller that features an impressive cast and a grim, almost oppressive sense of late 40s Russia under Joseph Stalin's iron-fisted rule."

Updated through 8/5.

Updates, 8/4: "Mr Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," writes Michael T Kaufman in the New York Times (which has a "Times Topics" page on Solzhenitsyn). "The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov." This first novel would be adapted by screenwriter Ronald Harwood and director Caspar Wrede for a film starring Tom Courtenay.

Michael Scammell, in his must-read obit for the Guardian, on Denisovich: "There had been nothing like it in the entire history of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn had achieved the miracle of pleasing his country's leaders, its critically minded intelligentsia, and the broad mass of his readers. Moreover, his impact on foreign readers was almost as strong: within weeks his name was known all over the world." But of course: "Solzhenitsyn's fall from official grace was almost as precipitous as his rise." As Scammell notes earlier, "it was his devotion to revolutionary purity that was to prove his undoing."

The BBC collects tributes.

"In 1994, at age 75, a bearded, patriarchal Solzhenitsyn returned from exile to his native Russia, where he was welcomed as a hero, the prophet of the post-Soviet era," writes Lev Grossman for Time. "But he was never quite in step with the new Russia. To Solzhenitsyn, Russia meant the old Russia of the 19th century, a nostalgic, spiritual Russia of the soul. To Russians, Russia was something else - an increasingly Western and forward-looking and materialistic nation. But Solzhenitsyn remained hopeful that the coming centuries would bring with them a world where mankind's material and spiritual lives, our bodies and our souls, would be able to flourish together."

"America was perhaps an ill-chosen destination for a man of Solzhenitsyn's stern moral temperament," notes the Telegraph. "If he had despised the heavy-handed Soviet rule, he came to loathe the West's 'smug hedonism' in almost equal measure. This view did little to endear him to the American media, which lost no time in transforming the dissident hero into a bigoted, anti-social ingrate.... Domineering and self-righteous, he was none the less a remarkable human being, a visionary, a crusader in the simplest sense, who was steered in his writing, as in his actions, by a deep sense of justice."

In the London Times, Tony Halpin notes that the three-volume Gulag Archipelago, "which took a decade to complete, forced many Western sympathisers to revise their views of the Soviet regime."

"If you are interested in historical irony, you might care to notice that any one chapter of Ivan Denisovich, published in Novy Mir during the Khrushchev de-Stalinization, easily surpassed in its impact any number of books and tracts that had taken 'socialist realism' as their watchword," remarks Christopher Hitchens in Slate. "The whole point about 'realism' - real realism - is that it needs no identifying prefix. Solzhenitsyn's work demonstrates this for all time."

"On Monday, national leaders expressed admiration for Mr Solzhenitsyn, but there did not seem the kind of outpouring that arises when a beloved figure dies," reports Clifford J Levy for the NYT from Moscow. "The relatively subdued response raised the question of whether Mr Solzhenitsyn's life and work still resonate in a Russia that is far different from the Soviet Union it replaced."

Updates, 8/5: In the NYT, Serge Schmemann recalls the writer's years in Vermont: "Joseph Brodsky, another great literary exile, once told me that writing poetry in Russian became difficult for him in America after the language ceased to surround him. Solzhenitsyn seemed to fear a similar fate - that any interest or involvement in his new surroundings would dilute his self-imposed, sacred mission of rescuing Russia."

In Slate, Anne Applebaum recalls the impact of The Gulag Archipelago: "[N]o one who dealt with the Soviet Union, diplomatically or intellectually, could ignore it. So threatening was the book to certain branches of the European left that Jean-Paul Sartre described Solzhenitsyn as a 'dangerous element.' The book's publication certainly contributed to the recognition of human rights as a legitimate element of international debate and foreign policy.... In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous - or notorious - but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work. They read his books because they already knew that they were true."

Spiegel Online rounds up clips from the German press (in English): "[E]ditorialists criticize the role the Nobel Prize winner played in his later life in pushing Moscow away from the West."

Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2008 2:33 PM