Excerpt From My Daily Solzhenitsyn

Goryainov-Shakhovsky! The little old man, slovenly in his old age...he was purged in the interests of "freshening up" the staff. He went to Moscow, and returned with a note from Kalinin: "Don't touch this old man!" It was rumored that Kalinin's father had been a serf of the professor's father's.

So they did not touch him. They did not touch him in a way that was awesome. He might write a research paper in the natural sciences containing a mathematical proof of the existence of God. Or at a public lecture on his beloved Newton he might wheeze from behind his yellow mustaches: "Someone just passed me a note: 'Marx wrote that Newton was a materialist, and you say he was an idealist.' I reply [said the old man]: Marx was wrong. Newton believed in God, like every other great scientist."

From the Rosicrucians, The First Circle, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (pronounced, Sol-zhen-neetzen, for those who were wondering and found the title too daunting).