Famed Russian author/dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. You can't consider yourself even half a literary maven if you haven't read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and at least some of Gulag Archipelago (the latter is a rough thing to get through). Talk about suffering for your art: This guy spent years in prison and labor camps for the crime of speaking out against Stalin in a personal letter, then almost died of cancer (leading to his novel Cancer Ward which is also a harrowing read), then lived through internal exile and being thrown out of the Soviet Union altogether for publishing Gulag Archipelago, his intensive accounting of the crimes of Stalin. Little twats who talk big about art and suffering should be made to read about Solzhenitsyn's life. If they can read.
