The pseudo intellectuals are crawling out of the woodwork.

Better dead than read.

He seamed to offend intellectuals in America and they still remember that, but he certainly understood a struggle for freedom.  His arrest was because someone else wanted his position.  Eight years could turn to 10, or 20 by way of an angry official, no court of redress,.  Solzhenitsyn was a fantastic writer telling of his hardship in the gulag and with his depictions of real people, won a prize, no trivial achievement.  Two of his books were boring, history of WW I and story of a surveillance officer I thought, but others were great.  I remember the story of Denisovich when he was just released from prison, took a train ride to an out of the way town, didn’t know how to walk right, how to speak to people, had to re-learn all that. I had trouble putting these stories down, going to reread them.

R.I.P, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Re Double U, August 6 at 3:43 pm #

Howard, leave it to you to shit on the memory of a great mind, heart and soul with the turd that was and is Ayn Rand.  She is the personification of the diseased pimp and the rat’s sphincter.  Of course you dig her.  You make it a real effort to not vomit.
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Double,

I’m with U, man! I don’t know which is more disgusting, Howard or Ayn Rand!

Tim, it’s good to know that someone has their wits about them.  Greetings!

Out of respect for the truth and for Alex, himself, we should not skirt the fact that his is one of those cases where the man was made by his time and his space.  We can kid ourselves all day and night but Alex would have been just another mediocre talent if not for the circumstances that forced the dormant spark.

Howard, leave it to you to shit on the memory of a great mind, heart and soul with the turd that was and is Ayn Rand.  She is the personification of the diseased pimp and the rat’s sphincter.  Of course you dig her.  You make it a real effort to not vomit.

The thing that pisses me off is that I always heard Solzhneitsyn was rushin’.  I could just never figure out what his hurry was. 
If we need anything, we need real human beings like him.

An amazing mind has passed away from the midst of humanity.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one in high school I read and read everything he wrote that was in our library.  I was surprised that Nikita Khrushchev was the reformist that allowed that voice to be heard.  I thought the communists were all nefarious thugs.  I still do, but that is neither here nor there.  This article was really much too brief to do his stature justice.  Although he was a communist in the early part of his adult life, he quickly became disillusioned with the totalitarian path communism usually takes.  He then became quite the critic and was vilified by the Soviet body politic. He was not enamored with American politics either and turned his back on the conservative Republican government of Ronald Reagan. Why should he have been?  This did not diminish his ability to write what he saw as human travesty.  I did not find his writing boring nor did I see him as a “neo” conservative.  If he was anything he was an old conservative and I see it as a reaction to totalitarian and oppressive communism.  Trying to force him into an American mold is completely consistent with American hubris.  He was a Russian with patriotism to his homeland.  American liberals criticized him for that but his views were his own and did not need to be “reconditioned” to have vacuous American values.  He also wrote revisionist history so that the truth be known about the behavior of the completely iniquitous and vile Soviet and the order of depravity they engendered.

He was a literary giant if there ever was one. Outstanding writer. Most influential, for sure.
Along with Ayn Rand !
Just super writers.