Russian Premier Vladimir Putin pays condolence to Natalya Solzhenitsyna, the widow of the famous Russian author, Soviet dissident and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn during the farewell ceremony in the Russian Academy of Science building in Moscow, Russia 05 August 2008. Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure late Sunday at the age of 89 and will be burried on the cemetery of Donskoy Monastery in Moscow on Wednesday 06 August. (EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV)Moscow: August 4th. (ENI) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who survived the Soviet gulag of labour camps under dictator Josef Stalin, will go down in history as a "model of inner freedom and human dignity," a top official of the Russian Orthodox Church has said. Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow of heart failure late on Sunday night. He was 89 years old. "He was able to speak boldly with the rulers of his country and of the West, [and] with the people, without fearing to speak the truth and without being a slave to fashion or public opinion," the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy chairperson of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, was quoted as saying by the Interfax-religion news agency.
A report on patriarchia.ru, the official Web site of the Moscow Patriarchate, described Solzhenitsyn as "one of the spiritual leaders of patriotic Orthodox organizations". The Rev. Vladimir Vigilyansky, director of the Moscow Patriarchate's press service, told RIA Novosti, an official Russian news agency, that the Russian Orthodox Church would be holding memorial services for Solzhenitsyn. He described the writer as a believer who was in close contact with many clerics and religious thinkers. "Without a doubt he thought within a religious framework and his views on man and society were of a clearly religious character," Vigilyansky told the news agency.
Solzhenitsyn came to fame in 1962 with his book, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Critics compared the short novel about prison camp life to works by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the book came to epitomise the promise, and the beginning of the end of the period of thaw, under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974 after the publication in the West of "The Gulag Archipelago", his monumental history of the Soviet prison camp system. He soon settled in the United States, in Cavendish, Vermont but did not embrace the American way of life. He returned to Russia in 1994, and travelled across the country by train from Vladivostok to Moscow. The state of Russia depressed him and the initial triumphant response to his return soon faded. In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published "Two Hundred Years Together," a study of the relationship between Russians and Jews that fanned charges that he was anti-Semitic. David Remnick, writer and editor of the New Yorker, who has profiled Solzhenitsyn, defended Solzhenitsyn against such accusations. "Solzhenitsyn, in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not in his personal relations anti-Jewish," Remnick wrote in 2001.
Solzhenitsyn did not approve of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and became disenchanted with Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president of Russia. Still, in 2007, he accepted a State prize from then-president Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet-era secret intelligence agency, the KGB. Solzhenitsyn told the German weekly Der Spiegel in an interview that Putin, "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country with a poor and demoralised people. And he started to do what was possible: a slow and gradual restoration."
by Sophia Kishkovsky
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Mozlink
No comments:
Post a Comment