Stand Alone Pages on 'Musings of an Old Curmudgeon'

11 December 2017

Happy Birthday, Aleksandr Isayevich!

Today would have been the 99th birthday of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. historian, novelist, devout Russian Orthodox Christian, and victim of Stalin's Gulag. 

After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he finally was allowed to leave the slave camp that pretended to be a workers' paradise. Moving to the West, he ended up living in Vermont.

He was the darling of the Western intelligentsia until he was given an honourary degree by Harvard University, and invited to give the Commencement Address in 1978. He immediately fell out of favour with the chattering classes, because in that speech, he roundly denounced the vapid, man-centred culture of the consumerist West.

He returned to Russia after the fall of the Evil Empire, and died there on 3 August 2008 at the age of 89. He is buried in the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. 

Вѣчьнаꙗ памѧть! Memory Eternal!

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