MOSCOW - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labour camps, was buried Wednesday in a Russian Orthodox ceremony that included goose-stepping guards and the dirges of a religious choir.
Solzhenitsyn -- who died Sunday at his home outside Moscow at age 89 from a chronic heart condition -- was buried according to his will amid the pink brick cupolas of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery, where famous Russian cultural figures have been laid to rest since the 18th century.
The service, attended by President Dmitry Medvedev, had the trappings of a state funeral -- honour guards, a military band and rifles fired in salute.
As pallbearers lowered Solzhenitsyn's casket into the ground, white-robed priests sang a hymn alongside Solzhenitsyn's wife and children.
Throughout the chilly summer morning, mourners, many bearing carnations and roses, flowed into the monastery's main church where Solzhenitsyn lay in an open casket.
A day earlier, thousands turned out in the rain to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn at a wake at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Most of the mourners appeared old enough to remember the impact of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,'' which revealed the existence of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag, or slave labour camp system.
The book was first published in 1962 during a period of relaxed censorship under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Galina Muravyova, 66, a teacher who first read Solzhenitsyn when his writings were circulated underground in the Soviet era, disliked the military element of Wednesday's funeral, questioning whether it was fitting for soldiers to serve as Solzhenitsyn's pallbearers.
"Soldiers guarded him in the labour camp and now they are around him here,'' she said. "But that's the way it is.''
Muravyova said her favourite work was Solzhenitsyn's nonfiction trilogy, "The Gulag Archipelago,'' which was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1989 although it circulated underground. The work inspired a generation of Soviet dissidents.
Margarita Avetisyan, 74, who came bearing long-stemmed carnations, said she fell in love with Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of Russian womanhood when she read his story "Matryona's Place'' in the journal Novy Mir in 1963. She still remembers the details 45 years later.
For young Russians, many of whom have no memory of Soviet life, Solzhenitsyn seems a stern figure from an age gone by.
Liza Gorshenina, 20, an engineering student from the provincial city of Ryazan, said she felt moved to pay her respects because she was touched by Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of engineers in his 1968 novel "The First Circle.''
Gorshenina said seeing Solzhenitsyn in his open casket in the monastery's main church was an emotional moment.
"This is a man I had always wanted to see,'' she said. "It is just too bad it was only after his death.''
Solzhenitsyn, who lived in the United States for 20 years after being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, leaves a legacy as thorny and complicated as his defiant and strict personality.
He returned to Russia in 1994 and later estranged himself from liberal reformers when he embraced former president Vladimir Putin's campaign to restore centralized, topdown rule in Russia.
A devout Christian and Russian patriot, Solzhenitsyn supported Putin's efforts to restore Russia's pride and prestige.
After paying his respects to Solzhenitsyn's family at Tuesday's wake, Putin, now Russia's prime minister, instructed the country's education minister to include Solzhenitsyn's as a prominent part of school and university curricula.
