Erica Wagner at the London Times notes the passage of one of the great voices of freedom: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: [1]
Years of internal exile and suffering never daunted him. The 1962 publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a revelation; until its publication in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir, no Soviet writer had dared tackle the subject of Stalin’s concentration camps. “Solzhenitsyn’s words burn like acid,” said The New York Times when the English translation appeared a year later.
No shock that since Wagner is a literary critic at the London Times, that her obit would take on a literary angle. Perhaps since that’s how most people know of him and his life, that’s fitting.
No shock, either… (and I’m sorry, but this must be said)… that the Paper of Walter Duranty’s Record, the New York Times, should write a huge article on the subject [2], one that completely ignored the role they played in supporting the horrors that Solzhenitsyn described, becoming the official apologist for the Soviet monster, in America. Arguably, it would have been far more appropiate for the NY Times to issue an apolgy to Solzhenitsyn before his death. But, apparently the lesson remains unlearned, even with so great a teacher.
Sad, really.