I don’t seem to see very many references in Solzhenitsyn’s obituaries to his
famous saying, repeated constantly by Russian dissidents, "Live Not by
the Lie." (I preferred to translate it that way, to reference "The Big
Lie", although it was commonly translated as "Live Not By Lies" as well. Solzhenitsyn described the insufferably oppressed Soviet life in 1974, but came up with a remedy:

"And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected
liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.
Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but
not with any help from me."

I never had the opportunity to meet Solzhenitsyn in person, only
chancing to meet his wife a few times briefly as junior staff to other
more important people at various events. I was the translator of
The Solzhenitsyn Files edited by Michael Scammell (a biographer of Solzhenitsyn), a book, like the Sakharov KGB files, that tells you more about the obsessive and paranoid KGB than about the authors they stalked and persecuted.

I had my say on the New York Times,
and added to the discussion at opendemocracy.net where I think Evgeny
Morozov has really come up with a brilliant concept of what I could
call "the crowd-sourcing of hate," or the outsourcing of ideology that
applies not only to Russia.

Through various circumstances, I once translated parts of a manuscript by Solzhenitsyn in 1993, back when the late Michael Bessie had plans to publish it in his Bessie Books imprint, but
ultimately did not — it was too dense and inaccessible for the American reader. At first I recalled this project as Rebuilding Russia, but since that was already translated in 1991, it must have been what became The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century, later translated by his son Yermolai Solzhenitsyn and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I spent a rather challenging summer in
Maine in a trailer on our farm with a crappy laptop and flickering electricity, nursing a baby and struggling to make sense of this prose, with my Russian
inlaws nearly as baffled as I was. I felt the task was far beyond
me and kept saying "give it to the sons" — everybody always said Solzhenitsyn wrote in a language I might call a kind of ancient neologism, if there is such a
thing, and then I saw what they meant. A problem with Rebuilding Russia was that the Soviet Union had already collapsed, and the prescription Solzhenitsyn had for Rus’ was to keep Belarus, Ukraine, and maybe Kazakhstan, but let go the non-Slavic republics…

I’ll never forget an English class in 1973 when the Gulag came out, and Mrs. Betsy Exner wrote a paragraph on the board, and asked us to think about it and write an essay, although it was rather over our heads:

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

Michael Kaufman’s obituary is pretty definitive, but you need to read Richard Pipes on the issue of Solzhenitsyn’s struggle with antisemitism and Cathy Young on the "tarnished legacy". Quite a few people flinched at Aleksandr Isayevich’s acceptance of prizes and flowers from Vladimir Putin, but I do think there is a yearning in the Russian intellectual for dialogue with the authorities where possible, and I looked at Solzhenitsyn’s appearance with Putin rather like the time Ludmila Alexeyeva went to receive flowers from the autocrat — she always had an idea that accepting the KGB as interlocutors, you might civilize them…