Solzhenitsyn was buried yesterday in Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev joined hundreds of mourners and a host of Orthodox clergy, for a ceremony for the great dissident with all of the trappings of a state funeral.
From PopMatters a tribute to his life and letters and his constant search for truth.
“And so those who survive Solzhenitsyn should honor his words by trying to say nothing false about him in saluting his magnificent life.
In an English-speaking world where we apply “great” to a well-diced salad, or the barely heard news that the person we’re greeting is feeling fine, the only way to reinvest it with gravitas is to outline the many ways Solzhenitsyn earned it, while countering the falsehoods that gathered about his name.”
Solzhenitsyn would have liked that. One biographer, Joseph Pearce, (“Solzhenitsyn: A Soul on Exile,” 1999), asked him shortly before his 80th birthday how he’d like to be remembered.
The indefatigable novelist and historian replied that he hoped lies and slanders about him “would, like mud, dry up and fall off. It is amazing how much gibberish has been talked about me, more so in the West than in the U.S.S.R.”
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