Word: solzhenitsyn
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Nonetheless, his books circulated widely in Russia by samizdat (self-publishing) and became bestsellers in the West. At the same time, he became the spiritual leader of Russia's dissident "democratic movement." The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Solzhenitsyn in 1970 infuriated the Soviets, for it only enhanced the worldwide following that made him hard to silence...
...Giant Thorn. Solzhenitsyn's final and intolerable challenge came when he authorized publication in Paris of the first two parts of The Gulag Archipelago...
...Mission. Britain's leading specialist in Soviet literature, Max Hayward, points out that "Solzhenitsyn is already a fully formed, great writer who has completed many major works in Russia. Exile is hardly likely to affect him now as a writer." Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics adds that "even if he is cut off from the living speech of Russia, he is now engaged in writing historical works, and there is no doubt that he has a tremendous gift of bringing history alive that is denied to us mere historians...
Before his exile, Solzhenitsyn spoke of his "relief and calmness" in the accomplishment of his mission. This he perceives as a memorial to the dead of the archipelago. But his books are also Solzhenitsyn's gift to the living. Mindful of George Orwell's dictum that he "who controls the past controls the future," he has already wrested Soviet history from those bent on obliterating it and restored it to his people. In the future, he may also succeed in quickening the conscience of both the oppressed and the oppressors in his unhappy country. For, as he wrote...
...make: five as yet unpublished sequels to Gulag deal with repression under Khrushchev and his successor Leonid Brezhnev. Soviet frustration was mixed with anger when the author declared that he would order all his banned work published abroad if he was arrested. Defying the regime to act against him, Solzhenitsyn answered a barrage of criticism in the Soviet press with ever more daring and pointed rebuttals...