Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89
Monday, August 4th, 2008
photograph by Mikhail Evstafiev
Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89 from heart failure. He was in work camps, sentenced to a life of exile, had cancer, lived in hiding, got a Nobel Prize, spent two decades in the West, returned to Russia, and didn’t die until the age of 89. I wonder if he ever imagined that he would even live to see the outside world or his 40th birthday when he was in the work camps. I remember reading Gulag Archipelago the first time in high school… I had to put it down halfway through for three years before finally finishing it. I wish I could say that I’ll be able to buy and read the thirty-volume edition of his collected works, but I’ll just say that he was a great writer and he’ll be missed.
