Yeetle Box - Pitt-Jolie Twins and Some Russian Guy

On Sunday evening, People Magazine unveiled the first pictures of Knox Léon Jolie-Pitt and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt. People teamed with London-based Hello! magazine to strike a deal with Pitt and Jolie. The two magazines reportedly shelled out $14 million for the pictures.

It's the second time the celebrity weekly won the North American rights to the couple's first-look baby pictures, and this is the third time Pitt and Jolie have worked with the two magazines in exchange for a hefty donation to charity.

While that momentous event was occurring, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

It should be noted, the twins were born three weeks ago and join the other Jolie-Pitt children -- Maddox, 6, Pax, 4, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2 - all named after things that do not make sense.

On the other hand, through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

Then again, People interviewed the family at the Château Miraval in Provence, France, where they have been staying this summer.

His writings inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Said Jolie to People,"It is chaos, but we are managing it and having a wonderful time," speaking of the daily life at the Château Miraval.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

Adds Pitt: "[It's] still a cuckoo's nest."

Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."

Fortunately, they already have some household helpers. "[Shiloh] and Z pick out [the twins'] clothes and help change and hold them," says Jolie. "It's sweet -- they are little mommies."

His "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

The Yeetle Box