Russia's Heroic Literary Curmudgeon

Solzhenitsyn once described Gorbachev's administration as "amazingly politically naive, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country."

He was even more critical of Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, telling Der Spiegel that Yeltsin started "a mass, multibillion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called directly for separatism and passed laws that encouraged and empowered the collapse of the Russian state. This, of course, deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community. All this met with even more hearty Western applause."

For Russia's small and powerless opposition and some of the country's writers and former dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was a polarizing figure, and his passing has been met with ambivalence as well as acclaim.

The writer was again praised Monday for his searing and unmatched chronicles of the brutal camp system known as the Gulag, where Solzhenitsyn and millions of compatriots either suffered or died. "When Solzhenitsyn first appeared on the Soviet literary scene, it was the greatest news," said the Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, in a telephone interview. "No one wrote about Stalin's camps as he did. His impact was sensational, and I was one of his admirers."

But in a 1986 novel, "Moscow 2042," Voinovich mocked Solzhenitsyn by means of a thinly disguised character, a mad, dictatorial egoist bent on becoming the king of Russia.

"For him, Putin was an exemplary autocrat," Voinovich said in the interview. "For me, a great writer must defend mankind, and he loses his reputation if he becomes too close to the highest power."

Arseny Roginsky, head of Memorial, a Russian human rights organization dedicated to the investigation of political persecution in the Soviet Union and the commemoration of its victims, suggested that Solzhenitsyn's legacy is greater than any of his individual political views.

"Solzhenitsyn said many things I radically disagree with, including his comments on Putin," Roginsky said in a telephone interview. "But the meaning of Solzhenitsyn is not lessened because of this. Through his books -- "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago" -- he gave birth to the whole tradition of remembering the tragic past of Russia, and the connection of this memory with today and tomorrow, and building a civilized Russia."

Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant and Kremlin insider, said in an interview that Solzhenitsyn came to view Putin as "the man who restored the country, the man who saved the nation and didn't allow it to turn back to totalitarianism."

Indeed, in rare interviews, Solzhenitsyn brushed aside Western criticism of Putin's rule and the centralization of power in the Kremlin. "Of course Russia is not a democratic country yet; it is just starting to build democracy," he told Der Spiegel. "It is all too easy to take Russia to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes. But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West's irrational refusal of this hand."

In 2007, Solzhenitsyn accepted a lifetime humanitarian achievement award from Putin, a state award he had refused when it was offered by Gorbachev and then Yeltsin. Putin traveled to the writer's home in Troitse-Lykovo, outside Moscow, to present the award.

"I, for my part, drew the writer's attention to the fact that some steps we are taking today are largely in accordance with what Solzhenitsyn once wrote about," said Putin, speaking to journalists after the meeting.