Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died

The Russian Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday in Moscow. La Repubblica looks back on the writer's eventful life: "Solzhenitsyn lived five lives: first his career as a patriot, then as a prisoner in Stalin's camps, then as an illustrious dissident, then as an exile, and finally as a prophet returning home." Yet his work was not universally praised, the paper writes: "Solzhenitsyn was a great polemicist who swam against the tide. That won him fervent admirers. But it also won him fervent enemies, in the state apparatus and among intellectuals, who looked askance at his ideology and his behaviour and had doubts about the artistic depth of his works. Solzhenitsyn viewed his country without blinkers, but his statements were often contradictory, not infrequently superficial, and increasingly dealt with the distinctiveness of the Russian character, aligning with the Slavophile tradition. In his religious conversion he would have nothing of modern theology, contenting himself with an elegiac retreat into ancient orthodoxy."

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