Word: solzhenitsyn
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Spoken by a cynical patient in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, the statement conveys the fatalism that many people feel about the congeries of diseases called cancer. One out of every four Americans can expect to develop the disease during his lifetime. Despite this toll, there is evidence that the crab's grip is at last being loosened...
...attitude that Solzhenitsyn will take later in the work toward the Bolshevik revolution is an intriguing subject for speculation. Not too much in August 1914indicates that it will be favorable. The one Bolshevik personality who makes an appearance is not shown in a flattering light. At several points he makes disparaging remarks on the feasibility of instituting a perfect social order, and several conversations in the book that serve only to carry a philosophical point indicate that to Solzhenitsym attempts in that direction are dangerously foolish. Alternatives are tentatively presented, as he toys with the idea of a technocracy...
...novel by the man who is the undisputed living master of Russian literature it is not a masterpiece. But it may look better in context if Solzhenitsyn ever finishes the work that he has planned since his early youth...
This failure to clearly portray individuals becomes extraordinary in light of a principal philosophical stance expressed by Solzhenitsyn. He argues that individuals especially through their personal incompetence have a personal force on history that Tolstoy excludes in War and Peace He makes this assertion in a direct comment to the reader, dropping any particular distance that an author might want to keep for the action of his novel, and contradicts Tolstoy by name in a short expository essay sitting roughly in the middle of the narrative...
...scheme of his work progresses Solzhenitsyn will take up subjects somewhat closer in time and considerably more controversies to his contemporary government. August 1914 defects the old regime at war, and its portrait of ineffectual corruption is relatively innocuous. But the most prominent themes that run through the first installment are an intense Russian (rather than Soviet) patriotism and regard for Orthodoxy. Solzhenitsyn is today called a Christian and he respects that Revolutionary Russian Orthodox believer to a degree unusual in the Soviet Union. One reason that the work has not been published in his own country in his refusal...