From American blogger Fresh Eyes:

Reading Solzhenitsyn
Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Every bookseller knows the drill: A famous author dies and the publishing industry scrambles briefly to exercise its (our) tradition of retail mourning.

Long neglected backlist titles are, momentarily, hot commodities; shrine-like displays appear on sales floors. It will happen again this week because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead. It's how we say goodbye.

And I want to do something as well; to pause and devote a column to Solzhenitsyn, which means that the series on bookstores and politics will have to wait until next week. For me, Solzhenitsyn isn't just another old, somewhat neglected writer riding off into history's sunset. I feel an obligation to tell you a little story about my decades-long connection to him; a reader's story, which inevitably makes it a writer's story and a bookseller's story.

Yesterday, I found myself engaged in a mourning ritual, which steadily grew into an awareness of telling details and memories:

This is a superb tribute that can be read in full here.