But Enough about You

THE headline in the Times a few weeks ago—SOLZHENITSYN, LITERARY GIANT WHO DEFIED SOVIETS, DIES AT 89—seemed to come out of nowhere. It was almost (I say this blushingly) as if he had already died. “Giant” is in his case precisely accurate, and yet . . . wasn’t the last time he got a headline in the Times because his TV show was canceled? That was as if a pope had been reduced to teaching Sunday school in the suburbs, and had gotten into some idiotic squabble with the parents association. How did Emerson put it? Every hero becomes a bore at last.

But it wasn’t boring reading his obituary, to which the Times devoted two entire inside pages, the kind of acreage normally devoted to great statesmen, or indeed, popes. His life reads like a Russian novel, and a long one at that. It seems ironic that he became world-famous, in 1963, for a Russian novel consisting of a mere 160 pages; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky took at least that many to clear their throats.

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THE headline in the Times a few weeks ago—SOLZHENITSYN, LITERARY GIANT WHO DEFIED SOVIETS, DIES AT 89—seemed to come out of nowhere. It was almost (I say this blushingly) as if he had already died. “Giant” is in his case precisely accurate, and yet . . . wasn’t the last time he got a headline in the Times because his TV show was canceled? That was as if a pope had been reduced to teaching Sunday school in the suburbs, and had gotten into some idiotic squabble with the parents association. How did Emerson put it? Every hero becomes a bore at last.

But it wasn’t boring reading his obituary, to which the Times devoted two entire inside pages, the kind of acreage normally devoted to great statesmen, or indeed, popes. His life reads like a Russian novel, and a long one at that. It seems ironic that he became world-famous, in 1963, for a Russian novel consisting of a mere 160 pages; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky took at least that many to clear their throats.