Word: gulags
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...community's moral leper was promoted to something of a cultural hero. That elevation was not so odd as it first appeared. Soviet espionage, after all, was no fiction: wartime thieves of atomic secrets had been tried and convicted in federal courts. Nor was the Gulag a fantasy; as early as the '30s Stalin's murderous intent had been revealed. The "Red Menace" has been revised downward many times, but a generation ago there were many non-hysterical, unxenophobic Americans who found Communist rhetoric and performance to be morally squalid, and who deserved better than the work...
Much of Aksyonov's fiction has a dark and enigmatic cast that is the shadow of the Gulag. Like many other contemporary Soviet writers, he is the child of Stalin's victims: Aksyonov was brought up in one of the infamous orphanages called Homes for the Children of Enemies of the People. Few writers can reproduce the lingering stench of brutality and fear better than he. In his story Victory, a gem of Russian short fiction, a chance game of chess on a train between a brutish but canny player and an intellectual becomes a moral life...
...shift in Kremlin policy took place. By 1967 One Day had been banned and the theme of the Gulag in literature forbidden. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn had discovered an instructive fact about the Soviet authorities: "That strength and steadfastness are the only things these people fear; those who smile and bow to them they crush." He harried the enemy all the more. He issued protests, declarations and open letters to Politburo members, to the head of the KGB and to officials of the Writers' Union. His friends and supporters slipped copies to Western correspondents. The documents were published abroad, then broadcast...
...Soviet readers by other means. Though under surveillance and in constant danger of arrest or assassination, he contrived a kind of literary Dunkirk. He smuggled out to the West every one of his divisions and army corps. These had now grown in force and number to include the monumental Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf and August 1914. He gave instructions that vest-pocket editions of his books be printed in Russian on Bible paper by his Paris publisher for more convenient smuggling to the Soviet Union. At the same time, foreign short-wave stations were regularly broad casting...
...bell was tolling. The bell of fate and of history . . . Sending Gulag would be a rash, a very risky, business, but opportunities were few, and there was no other in prospect. Right, I would send it. The heart had surfaced from one anxiety only to plunge into another. There was no rest. But - two novels of mine appearing simultaneously in the West? A double? I felt like the Hawaiian surf riders described by Jack London, standing upright on a smooth board, with nothing to hold on to, nothing to hamper me, on the crest of the ninth wave, my lungs...