Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn mourned in Russia
An old and weary-looking crowd comes to view the body of Solzhenitsyn, a writer exiled for criticizing repression in the Soviet Union. On a dreary day, one says, 'The sky is crying.'
MOSCOW -- Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, an author imprisoned and later forced into exile for his critical depictions of the Soviet Union, lay in a marble chamber in the heart of the capital today, guarded by Russian soldiers and mourned by thousands of his countrymen.
Many of the mourners were old and weary looking, pensioners who didn't have jobs to miss. They came shuffling out of the Metro and splashing through the puddles, clutching a few carnations or roses -- even numbers of stems, because in Russia the even numbers are traditionally reserved for death. They came dragging their memories with them; it was hard to spot anybody who looked young enough to have been born after 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
"The sky is crying," said Yuri Agayev, a frail-looking man with thinning white hair, limping off into the wet afternoon. "God is crying."
It was a dark day, but Igor Andreyev wore his sunglasses. He'd taken the overnight train from St. Petersburg, where he's a retired librarian and a member of the Solzhenitsyn Society. He too suffered through a Soviet exile, sent off to Sakhalin Island in the 1960s for membership in a neo-Marxist organization, he said.
Andreyev walked through the marble hall, paid silent respects to the corpse and came out through the other side, through the clusters of plainclothes security men muttering into their sleeves. Then he stood looking dazedly out into the day.
"It's nonsense," he said. "There were Duma deputies and FSB agents. They have nationalist ideas, and yet they're here today."
Not for nothing, the security details. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin was on the way to lay flowers on the coffin. The prime minister later appeared on television and called for Solzhenitsyn's books to be incorporated into the Russian curriculum.
"With the entire nation, he lived through a tragedy of repressions," Putin said on state television. "By his works and his entire life, he inoculated our society against tyranny in all its forms."
megan.stack@latimes.com
