Word: gulags
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Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, poet, historian of the Gulag and indefatigable polemicist-these are the various vocations that Alexander Solzhenitsyn has long pursued. Now, with the publication of The Oak and the Calf, yet another Solzhenitsyn has emerged: military strategist. This memoir reveals the embattled Russian writer as the master planner of his own personal twelve-year war with the Soviet regime. Few readers of his chronicle of combat will fail to be impressed by the bold forays and feints, the diversionary actions and tactical retreats that ultimately won Solzhenitsyn an unconditional victory, albeit only a moral...
...extended military metaphor is Solzhenitsyn's own. Scarcely any other image is large enough to encompass the feat of a writer who consistently outwitted and outmaneuvered Nikita Khrushchev, the KGB and the Soviet literary establishment in the pursuit of his mission: to bear witness to the Gulag before his countrymen and the world...
...ever set out on the warpath with less visible weaponry than Solzhenitsyn. Imprisoned in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953, he was one of the 5 million prisoners released from the camps during the three years following Stalin's death in 1953. In 1961 he was teaching school in a provincial Soviet town, living in obscurity, indeed in oblivion. His existence as a writer literally lay underground. In order to hide his work from the police, he buried two novels, One Day and The First Circle, two plays, a movie scenario and 12,000 lines of verse...
Solzhenitsyn did not stop to celebrate. The wary ex-prisoner had only one thought: to get more of his work published, a play produced, a screenplay made into a movie, before a shift in policy halted public discussion of the Gulag. When invited to a Kremlin reception at the height of his official favor, Solzhenitsyn made a point of wearing worker's garb and a much patched pair of shoes to remind the Soviet leaders that their guest was a Gulag survivor...
Guernica was the last masterpiece of painting to be provoked by political catastrophe. World War II and the Holocaust evoked nothing to match it, and the monuments to the Gulag are books, not paintings. Guernica's power flows from the contrast between its almost marmoreal formal system and the terrible vocabulary of pain that Picasso locked into it. It is shown at MOMA with all its preliminary studies, and to see Picasso developing these hieroglyphs of anguish, the horse, the weeping woman, the screaming head, the fallen soldier, the clenched hand on the sword, is to witness...