Word: solzhenitsyns
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...spent most of the summer digging in medieval leather tanning pits, wallowing amid the preserved medieval pig manure used to cure hides, I was generally quite dirty and smelly. Getting a shower before the hot water ran out was imperative. There was a vogue last summer to read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with great empathy for Ivan's enforced dependence upon his cunning to gauge the limits of his physical endurance...
Russian Poet and Editor Alexander T. Tvardovsky had died of a stroke at 61. The Soviet Writers Union did its best to keep his funeral quiet, but Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 53, whose novels (The Cancer Ward, The First Circle) have been banned in his homeland, made his first public appearance in several years to honor the man who had published his anti-Stalinist novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn did not speak, but his simple presence made Tvardovsky's funeral a testimony for cultural freedom. Earlier, Solzhenitsyn offered more outspoken testimony...
...medical bureaucrats obviously misjudged the national reputations of both Medvedevs and the courage of their eminent friends, who besieged officials up and down the Soviet power pyramid. The fiercest outcry came from Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who condemned punitive psychiatry as "spiritual murder...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about this predicament so successfully it is a shame that Casper Wrede perverts it for such useless motives in his film. The rare moments of joy in One Day are the most consequent in telling of Ivan's character. In Solzhenitsyn's novel they arise from an innate hope which constitutes Ivan's endurance. In the film Ivan appears to rasie himself above his suffering by a superhuman effort of will. He becomes a willful hero rather than Solzhenitsyn's enduring stoic. But there is no possible point of departure for his courage and his emotional moments...
...workers build up each others' enthusiasm with such lines as "Ivan you lay the bricks and I'll carry the mortar. We'll work twice as fast that way." Like almost all the dialogue in the film this line is admirably a direct translation from Solzhenitsyn's novel. But it is spoken by a wide eyed young man with all the fresh enthusiasm of a high school quarterback preparing for the next play. Solzhenitsyn can tone down the sense of imminent death in his novel because his Russian audience was well aware of the destitution of the prisoners' lives...