Mr. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner, prophet and Russian nationalist, has died at the age of 89. Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was marked by extraordinary adversity that he channeled into prolific writing. As is often the fate of such voices, he was alternately applauded and ignored, a source of both pride and embarrassment. Throughout it all, Mr. Solzhenitsyn refused to compromise, and his legacy is a body of exceptional work that documents a cruelty that is hardly imaginable.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 to a once wealthy family that had been impoverished. After getting a university degree, he was drafted by the Soviet Army just after the Nazi invasion of 1941, where he served as an artillery officer, and was twice decorated for bravery. His military career was cut short four months before the war's end when he was arrested for writing a letter critical of Josef Stalin. He was subsequently sentenced to eight years in labor camps and three years in exile in Siberia.
That bitter experience provided the background for his first novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which described life in the camps. The short book was written in 1959, a few years after his release, and published three years later, one of the flowers that bloomed during Nikita Khrushchev's attempt to distance his regime from that of Stalin. Publication of the book constituted Soviet acknowledgment of the horrors of the gulag and implicit recognition that they were a product of the Soviet system itself. Sadly, that brief flirtation with liberalism ended with Khrushchev's own fall from power in 1964.