Solzhenitsyn passes

uk.reuters.com...

Intense sadness is all I feel. What a pity he's gone.


God bless you.


Cait

[edit on 3-8-2008 by caitlinfae]

[edit on 3-8-2008 by caitlinfae]

Frankly, I thought he had died a few years ago. Shows how ignorant I am...
(Maybe I confused him with Mstislav Rostropovich, who was also his good friend.)

And I certainly understand your feelings.

Good thing he left us a great deal of himself - perhaps the noblest parts - in his writing.






[edit on 3-8-2008 by Vanitas]

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.

"Know thyself!" There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulders boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: "So were we any better?"
And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: "Bless you, prison!"

Oh, Western freedom-loving "left-wing" thinkers! Oh, left-wing labourists! Oh, American, German and French progressive students! All of this is still not enough for you. The whole book has been useless for you. You will understand everything immediately, when you yourself — "hands behind the back" — toddle into our Archipelago.

Wikipedia quotes, The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He was a true human being.

May he find the peace he deserves.

thanks cait for bringing the news although sad news
i also thought he must have been dead for years

a great writer

RIP