Word: solzhenitsyn
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...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...
...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...
Unable to continue publishing in the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn sought to reach 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...
...original Russian title of Solzhenitsyn's memoir is The Calf Kept Butting the Oak. The English equivalent of this Russian proverbial saying is "beating one's head against a stone wall." Russia is a land of proverbs. One that could apply to all of Solzhenitsyn's writings: "What has been written with a pen cannot be hacked away with an ax " - Patricia Blake