" Just as a star suddenly flares to a hundred times its previous brightness -- and then fades away, so, too, a human being not disposed to be a political may nonetheless flare up briefly and intensely in prison and perish as a result. Ordinarily we do not learn about these cases. Sometimes there is a witness to tell about them. Sometimes there is merely a faded piece of paper in front of us on which we can only build hypothesis; "
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged)