Word: denisovich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...specific written consent of the prisoner had been given. But it left the important questions unanswered, with its neutral, impersonal language. Who gave the order? Who administered the drug? Who took the prisoner to the room? Who "exercised" him? We are back in the world of Ivan Denisovich, of Gulag, of impartial officials and "broken consciences." It may be--it is hopefully--an isolated instance. But whenever a human being is considered manipulable, formable, breakable, at the last; whenever he is considered to be of no intrinsic worth, but only a thing, a useful thing or a useless thing; whenever...
...seen these human values destroyed by the absolute and arbitrary power of a despot ("the regrettable excesses of the personality cult") and by an increasing rigidification of ideology, belied briefly by relaxation in the early 1960s, when his own first novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published, followed by long years of increasing harrassment and official vilification. In the America of the late 20th century, it is unlikely that a dogmatic ideological totalitarianism will ever take root. But the apathy in moral questions to which a pluralistic society may so quickly lead is more insidious than...
With the banishment, Solzhenitsyn's remarkable career as a writer in Soviet Russia came full circle. It had begun with the official publication in 1962 of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that Pravda hailed as a masterpiece. Nikita Khrushchev was, in a way, his patron; he had encouraged the publication of One Day as part of his own effort to discredit Stalin. But once Khrushchev himself was deposed, there followed for Solzhenitsyn a decade of increasingly dramatic confrontations with the authorities. His subsequent novels were banned, and he was regularly excoriated...
...superb earlier novels (The First Cir cle, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Cancer Ward) were fiction alized reflections of that experience. In the first two parts of Gulag, however, he set out to document the entire range of horrors inflicted upon the Soviet people from 1918 to 1956. A 260,000-word mosaic, composed of personal reminiscences, interviews with survivors, and documents, Gulag lays out the intricate patterns of terror...
...many other Russian intellectuals, such as Pasternak, Daniel and Sinyavski, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, have been un able to accommodate. Medvedev's twin brother Roy, author of a massive anti-Stalinist work called Let History Judge, has also proved difficult. When Zhores Medvedev's Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich appeared in England last spring (TIME, May 28), it was apparently the guarantee of his exile...