Solzhenitsyn is Dead...

The irony of ironies is that it took a writer and the quintessential ex-pat writer such as Solzhenitsyn to bring down a gang like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
We aren't talking a writer like Howie Carr either, no Alexandr had real strength...talent endurance and a pathological inability to dummy up in the face of evil.
And that is ALL he had against an enemy armed with night sticks and a continent spanning totalitarian ideology.
The Man had the very touch of Orwell in him, same outrage, same direct lines of argument same disdain for the ruthless and the powerful among us. His brain boiled like an active volcano, for anyone else "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" would have been book enough for the ages but Solzhenitsyn went right on writing and writing producing "The First Circle" (his best work of fiction in Humble Elias' opinion) and then "The Gulag Archipelago".
Unlike Orwell though (who died at the dawn of the grim epoch he'd predicted), Solzhenitsyn outlived the Soviet Regime but never really found his place in the Russian successor state.
But then he was hardly at home in the West where he took refuge in 1973 after his expulsion from the USSR. Deep in the throes of his post Marxist Russian Orthodoxy he regularly questioned the West's collective courage in it's dealings with the USSR. He loathed our alleged materialism and consumerism and supposed timidity in the face of evil. Like a lot of profoundly conservative men he mistook the merely silly and self indulgement for the very bonfire of civilization.
It is a common error, almost all great men make it at one time or another.
And so he leaves us, any ten writers for the best journals in the land could easily fall into Solzhenitsyn's footprints and need a ladder to climb out.
That is how big a void he leaves.