Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of communist repression, died Sunday. He was 89.<\/p>\n
His son, Stephan Solzhenitsyn, told the Associated Press that his father died of heart failure in Moscow.<\/p>\n
The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia’s nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile – only to be as distressed by communism’s damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.<\/p>\n
Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned from his Vermont refuge to a dramatically changed Russia in 1994 but deemed it a moral ruin after a monthslong odyssey to become re-acquainted with the country that had denounced him as a traitor, stripped him of citizenship and expelled him in 1974.<\/p>\n
Hailed as Russia’s greatest living writer, the author of more than two dozen books – in addition to commentaries, poems, plays and film scripts – won back his citizenship and the respect of his fellow Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although his books were best-sellers in the West, only “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published first in his homeland.<\/p>\n