Russian writer Aleksandr (Alexander) Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin’s prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, died at his home from a stroke August 3, 2008.

It is art, and it is literature.

There is a miracle which they can work: they can overcome man’s unfortunate trait of learning only through his own experience, unaffected by that of others. From man to man, compensating for his brief time on earth, art communicates whole the burden of another’s long life experience with all its hardships, colors, and vitality, re-creating in the flesh what another has experienced, and allowing it to be acquired as one’s own.

~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Nobel Lecture