Sunday, August 3, 2008

Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies at 89


A stubborn, lonely and combative Nobel prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. According to his son Yermolai, the cause of his death was a heart ailment. In his life, Aleksandr outlived by almost 17 years the Soviet state and system. He had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Aleksandr was a middle-aged unpublished high school science teacher in one of the provincial Russian towns. He entered into the literary world in 1962 with "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." It was a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate. The book was a sensation. People, then, compared him to Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.

In the next five decades, his fame spread throughout the world. His other world renowned novels are "The First Circle," "The Cancer Ward" and "The Gulag Archipelago." The "Gulag" was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system. It is a chain of prisons that calculated some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. This book led to his expulson from his native land.

Aleksandr was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1970.