“The most important true thing to say is this: The greatest writer in the world died the other night in his Moscow apartment. In an English-speaking world where we apply “great” to a well-diced salad, or the barely heard news that the person we’re greeting is feeling fine, the only way to reinvest it with gravitas is to outline the many ways Solzhenitsyn earned it, while countering the falsehoods that gathered about his name.”