Word: solzhenitsyns
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...BEST REMAINING SOURCE Burg and Feifer possessed was the dissident intelligentsia composed of Solzhenitsyn's companions and allies. For whatever their reasons, these people were willing to talk, and they knew Solzhenitsyn's struggles with the government best. Hence, the bulk of the book concentrates on Solzhenitsyn since the early '60's. The authors focus on how he reaches the public: through bureaucratic labyrinths, through the even more nebulous and confused channels of samizdat (reproduction of manuscripts on typewriters and mimeograph machines), and through publication abroad. They also recount his personal harassment by authorities, his brief spell in political favor...
...refusal of both Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet bureaucracy to help Burg and Feifer closed the major sources of information about their man. The Soviet government must possess an encyclopedic knowledge of a writer it has kept under intermittent KGB surveillance since he was a Red Army Officer in the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn, a scrupulously honest writer who would obviously be the most knowledgeable source, refused, according to Feifer and Burg, to have anything to do with a biography. His position, they claimed, is that an author of autobiographical fiction (The Cancer Ward and The First Circle) need not expose...
...this detailed account of his difficulties with the government. Burg and Feifer have added a summary of Solzhenitsyn's personal background. They discuss his childhood, school days, training as a mathematician and experiences as an artillery officer. They detail at considerable length his experiences with prison camps and with cancer...
Burg and Feifer's direct attempts at criticizing Solzhenitsyn's work fall similarly on several counts. They make partisan defenses of his work which occasionally take an extraordinary form, such as the collaborate justification of August 1914 in terms of political orthodoxy. The biographers also have an unfortunate tendency to quote other people's superlatives as a justification for their own exaltation of Solzhenitsyn. The consensus of critics can no more save a piece of fiction than the vote of the Soviet Writers Union can condemn it. The authors' failure to give the sort of attention to the actual novels...
DISCUSSION OF THE political aspects of Solzhenitsyn's fiction is not a bad thing in itself, and any attempts at uncovering and commenting upon the nature of neo-Stalinist literary controls is interesting for its own sake. Solzhenitsyn must be discussed in his political context, for he is an intensely Russian writer. His medium is a difficult vernacular that is uncertainly translated, and his concerns are deeply nationalistic. By the choice of his subject matter he became a political writer, and the politics on which he writes are clearly very sensitive to his government. But a concern with the writer...