“Alexandr Zhdanov, a Soviet dissident artist whose life and work were marked by difficulty, defiance, determination and more than a touch of madness, died July 18 of a heart ailment at Howard University Hospital. He was 68. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was part of a group of independent-minded underground artists who challenged the authority of the Soviet Union’s communist officials and sometimes paid a bitter price for rebellion.”