Putin praises cellist on 80th birthday
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday cellist marked Mstislav Rostropovich’s 80th birthday by praising his musical accomplishments and his human rights activism.
“In all your life and creative work you have many times shown the truth that art and morality together supplement each other and constitute a single goal. In all of the world you are known not only as a brilliant cellist and gifted conductor but as a confirmed defender of human rights and freedom of spirit and an uncompromising fighter for the ideals of democracy,” Putin said in a statement.
Putin and Rostropovich were to meet Tuesday evening at a Kremlin reception. Celebrations of the artist’s birthday come amid concern over his health; he was hospitalized in February for illness that his aides did not specify, but Russian news media reported he had been in the country’s leading cancer hospital.
One of the giants of classical music, Rostropovich went into exile from the Soviet Union with his family in 1974 after housing dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn for four years. He and his wife Galina Vishnyevskaya eventually lost their Soviet citizenship.
The government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Tuesday published an article by Solzhenitzyn’s wife, Natalia, that included what she said was the first publication of a letter her husband wrote in May 1973 when they moved out of Rostropovich’s house.
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Source: News.yahoo.com
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