Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Every journalist has a few heroes. One of mine was Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who managed to combine great literature with great investigative reporting in exposing the brutality of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union.
Solzhenitzsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, first became famous for his novella, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which detailed a single day in the life of a Soviet political prisoner in the camps, a life Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand, having been a prisoner himself. It was allowed to be published in 1963 by Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev, who hoped it would help discredit his murderous predecessor, Joseph Stalin.
But I revered Solzhenitsyn most for his three volume history of the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, the first volume of which appeared in 1973. Gulag was investigative reporting as literature, laying out all the crimes of the Soviet Union from its beginning in 1918 through the 1950s. I could only imagine the work that Solzhenitsyn did to collect and verify the terrible tales he relates in his magnum opus. I read every word, and indeed have read two-thirds of all the books he wrote, excepting only the last three historical novels in the Red Wheel series.
Solzhenitsyn led a difficult life. He was thrown into the camps originally for referring to Stalin originally as "the man with the mustache," and barely survived stomach cancer. After Kruschchev was deposed in the mid-1960s, he led an increasingly perilous existence, collecting stories, writing them down, and secreting what he wrote to keep it away from the Soviet secret police. Gulag was published after the police interrogated his typist, who gave up the location of one of the copies and then hanged herself in shame.
Solzhenitsyn's fame around the world kept him alive, but he was thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He spent 18 years living in exile with his family in Vermont, and managed to alienate many of his western supporters with his writings and speeches. I don't hold that against him. Many great artists and great investigative reporters (Sy Hersh comes to mind) have personality issues. They aren't necessarily people you would want to hang out with, but you value their work.