Sunday was totally metal novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's last day on earth. Let's throw some Mega-HooM! Horns for the Nobel-winning Solzhenitsyn, who despite living before Metal, embodied the Metal Spirit by writing fearlessly about the Soviet Union's gulags and general mind-mangling, life-destroying tyranny. A decorated war hero, dude was in prison camps for eight years, where he suffered from stomach cancer and only saw release once Stalin dropped dead of mustache-itis. If I remember correctly -- there are a lot of drugs between now and my college years -- Stalin's successor, Khrushchev, allowed Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward to be published, and then got kicked the fuck out by hard-liners who again arrested Solzhenitsyn for sedition. Following the USSR's collapse, Solzhenitsyn returned to live in Russia in 1994. Now he's dead and that sucks. I imagine he and his elders Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Shalamov are shit-faced on vodka right this second in Metal Heaven.
Sorry for the history lesson. Go read One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago and marvel at the echoes of contemporary American government. I feel a new concept album coming on. Who's up for it? Queensryche? Gorky Park?
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