Word: solzhenitsyns
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...history of the manuscript of Gulag is nearly as tragic as its subject matter. Although Solzhenitsyn had begun researching the book in 1958, he did not start writing it until 1964, just as official Soviet acceptance of his works had be gun to wane. The 1962 publication in Russia of One Day, by Premier Nikita Khrushchev's order, had prompted hundreds of former prisoners to write to Solzhenitsyn, detailing their own experiences. Deeply moved, Solzhenitsyn shut himself up in a ramshackle dacha to work. He completed Gulag four years later. Solzhenitsyn was then unwilling to risk endangering his correspondents...
Last fall one of his friends yielded to five days of brutal KGB interrogation; after giving up a copy of the manuscript, she hanged herself (TIME, Sept. 17). Once Gulag was in the hands of the security police, Solzhenitsyn could no longer protect his informants, most of whom are named in the book. In the preface, he explains his decision to publish: "For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book. My obligation to those who are still alive outweighed my obligation to those who are dead. But now that State Security has seized...
Surprise Publication. Plans for publication of Gulag were kept secret by the author's Swiss lawyer. Though ru mors about the work had circulated for several years, its existence was denied by everybody close to Solzhenitsyn. Thus the announcement of imminent publication by Harper & Row and four European publishers took the world by surprise last week - as did the serialization of excerpts by the New York Times...
...releasing him. Medvedev's indignant dissidence (expressed in The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko and A Question of Madness) had marked him as a troublesome enemy of partiinost, that spirit of party orthodoxy that so many other Russian intellectuals, such as Pasternak, Daniel and Sinyavski, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, have been un able to accommodate. Medvedev's twin brother Roy, author of a massive anti-Stalinist work called Let History Judge, has also proved difficult. When Zhores Medvedev's Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich appeared in England last spring (TIME, May 28), it was apparently the guarantee...
...published in the U.S., Ten Years is a crisp, contemptuous and sometimes sardonic record of Russia's intellectual life in the decade since Nikita Khrushchev's temporary thaw allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his novel about life in a Stalinist work camp. At first Khrushchev praised One Day, but in March 1963 he told a meeting of party leaders and intellectuals: "Take my word for it, this is a very dangerous theme. It's a kind of stew that will attract flies like a carcass; all sorts of bourgeois scum from abroad will come crawling all over...