Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P. (1918-2008)

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Russian writer and intellectual, died today at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn was best known for Arkhipelag GULag, in English "The Gulag Archipelago," his exposé of the Russian prison system that was first published in Paris in 1973. He was also awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and similar writings.

Already banned from the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn became increasingly controversial in the West after his 1978 commencement address at Harvard, "A World Split Apart." In this speech he argued that liberty and culture were in decline in the West, and could not be revived unless God was again acknowledged and secular humanism rejected.

Solzhenitsyn's statement of these themes reached its fullest expression in his 1983 Templeton Address, which will serve as a fitting monument to him: "Men Have Forgotten God."