Are we missing the point?

Never normally one to downplay the importance of bringing the crimes of communism to a wider audience, I find myself doing just that over the coverage of Solzhenitsyn's death. I get the feeling we have forgotten how good the books are.

Of course, for Solzhenitsyn the distinction between the political and literary is blurred. Almost every one of his books deals with the evil of Soviet communism. However, by focusing exclusively on A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the Gulag Archipelago - as the obituaries do - , I cannot help by feel we are missing the point a little. The first is mostly autobiography, and striking for its revelatory power as well as for its writing, and the second essentially a historical work.

Yet he literary reputation doesn't rest on the Gulag, which he wrote after the Nobel prize, but on his other works. In particular The First Circle and The Cancer Ward are both brilliant.

So, let us applaud and commemorate his stance on communism, for it was a brave and necessary one. But let us not forget that he was a writer first.