The Last Day in the Life of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn

Or
That Gulag Sounds Pretty Good Right Now

Or
Alexsandr Solzhenits-out
(Stolen from the Derby Dead Pool, where I am in 33rd)
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, bitter old man, has died of heart failure at age 89. Solzhenitsyn was at first praised as a critic of Soviet Union by Americans looking to score a P.R. victory in the Cold War, but was later revealed to just be an unhappy crank when he came to the United States in exile in 1974 and quickly set about bitching about the West’s excesses and crass materialism. Then, with the fall of the Soviet totalitarian regime, well, the first one anyway, he returned and bitched about the newly freed people’s embracing the avarice of the West. This was a man who could not be made happy. This was the guy who calls the front desk from the penthouse in the middle of the night because his pillow mint wasn’t minty enough. Sentenced to a series of gulags for more than 12 years after referring to Josef Stalin as “the man with the mustache,” Solzhenitsyn used a variant of prayer beads to help memorize more than 12,000 lines of text, as anything written would have been seized. This would serve as the basis for much of his writing after his release. In 1962, he went from high school science teacher to Tolstoy’s successor with the publication of “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his novel about a prison camp inmate. He continued exposing Soviet brutality in his novels “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.” At first celebrated, his work was later forced underground and circulated around the world by international intellectuals, earning him the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to shut him up, the Soviets kicked him out, and he spent two decades in the American gulag of Vermont, generally in solitude, with occasional finger-wagging at his host nation, before being welcomed back with the fall of the Soviet Union, where he embraced Vladimir Putin for restoring Russian supremacy.