The body of writer and former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn lies in state in the Academy of Science in Moscow on August 5, 2008. Hundreds of people lined up on Tuesday to pay tribute to Solzhenitsyn as the author, dissident and patriot. (UPI Photo/Anatoli Zhdanov)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- With the death of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the world has lost one of its most remarkable writers, a literary colossus whose extraordinary body of work, while deeply rooted in the Russian literary tradition, nonetheless reverberated with humanistic themes of global importance.

Solzhenitsyn's extraordinary literary legacy is all the more remarkable given that he survived two of the most catastrophic events a human being can endure -- eight years in the maw of Stalin's concentration death camps, followed by a bout with cancer.

While the fulsome accolades to Solzhenitsyn largely revolve around his magisterial work "The Gulag Archipelago," on which he labored for a decade, the author himself saw it as merely one facet of his endeavors. He spent 17 years of his life on his epochal "Krasnoe Koleso" ("The Red Wheel"), a historical cycle of novels delving into Russia's descent into World War I and the end of the 300-year-old Romanov monarchy in March 1917, which was followed eight months later by Lenin's overthrow of the Provisional government. "The Red Wheel" was Solzhenitsyn's attempt to explain to his fellow countrymen and the world the events that bled Russia white early in the 20th century and set the stage for the most brutal system of social engineering ever attempted.

It is a measure of the West's declining interest in Solzhenitsyn that while the first three volumes of the work -- "August 1914," "November 1916" and "March 1917" -- were translated into English, his "April 1917," appearing in 1991, the final year of the Soviet Union, has yet to be translated into English. Ironically, Solzhenitsyn's star in the West began to dim shortly after he was exiled, when Western Cold Warriors realized that he was hardly a team player, a view crystallized in his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address, in which he castigated the West for losing its "civil courage."

Solzhenitsyn was not an easy read: His language was sprinkled with the slang of the camps, and his tone occasionally harsh, grating and judgmental, a complete contrast to the pellucid prose of Russia's greatest author, Alexander Pushkin, or Vladimir Nabokov, beloved for his artistic use of the nuances of the Russian language. Nevertheless, at his best, Solzhenitsyn was never less than compelling, as he meticulously chronicled the savage brutality inflicted on the Soviet population by their masters in the name of progress, an effort that won him in 1970 the Nobel Prize for literature even as it infuriated the Soviet government, which exiled him four years later. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia only in 1994.