The life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on 3 August aged 89, was one of contradictions. Once a fervent revolutionary, he has been buried at the Donskoy Orthodox monastery; embraced as an anti-Soviet icon by the west, he sternly criticised its "decline of civil courage"; despite his suffering at the hands of the Soviets, he remained an ardent, even reactionary, nationalist.

Sentenced to hard labour and exile in 1945 for "agitation and propaganda" - a series of letters criticising Stalin, "the man with the moustache" - Solzhenitsyn survived 11 years of gulags, Kazakhstan and cancer. From 1962, he became the first writer to lay bare the horrors of the camps in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, which brought about his second, 20-year exile in 1974 after the KGB unearthed an illicit manuscript.

On his return to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn expected to play a significant role in national politics. But he became increasingly isolated from a post-Soviet opposition that shared neither his mistrust of the west nor his eventual approval of Vladimir Putin, and from younger generations he regarded as "irresponsible". He did not settle gracefully into the role of elder statesman. "He was not one of those people that everyone loves," observed Moscow's business daily Kommersant. But, to the generations marked by the gulags, he remained a true, if difficult, Russian hero.

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