Word: solzhenitsyns
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There are many interesting ways to spend your time in the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has spent a lot of his incurring most of the suffering which the country's twentieth century history has to offer. After studying mathematics and physics for ten years he was drafted into the Soviet Army at the beginning of World War II. He served as an artillery officer in East Prussia and Germany, was decorated twice for bravery, and then sentenced to ten years in a labor camp hauling logs and laying bricks. Tass called his offence a "baseless political charge," probably incurred...
...Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicts just a part of this endurance. Accused of being a spy after escaping from German occupied territory. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sentenced to ten years in a special Siberian labor camp for "class dangerous elements", like the camp Karaganda where Solzhenitsyn spent eight years. Solzhenitsyn considers only the day of one victim of Stalin's forced industrialization and intensification of totalitarian control. But it is estimated that about four million people died in the labor camps between 1927 and 1940, not by premeditated genocide but from the disease, fatigue, and starvation that Ivan Denisovich suffers...
Because the particular problems of a labor camp inmate, like the particular problems of a heroin addict, are not like any other predicament they are especially difficult to portray. Solzhenitsyn conveys the prisoners' destitution by alternating between dead pan description of bodily pain and cowering before nameless authorities, and emphasis on the miniscule occurrences that bring relief from suffering. Ivan finds a hacksaw blade, gets a little tobacco, and uses his favorite spoon. These few moments in Ivan's day when he feels he can do something that he wants to do punctuate the bleak narrative description of camp routine...
SINCE 1901, when the Swedish Academy chose the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and bypassed Leo Tolstoy, the awards have often been surrounded by controversy. There is still a furor over last year's pick, Soviet Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose works (Cancer Ward; The First Circle) expose the authoritarianism of Soviet life. Fearing that he would not be allowed back into the U.S.S.R., he has not dared travel to Stockholm to accept the award; and the Swedish embassy, fearing an adverse reaction from its Soviet hosts, refuses to stage a public ceremony for him in Moscow...
...thirst. Yet now I am in the academic world of Cambridge finishing my Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics at MIT after being a guest of the East German state for two years--fourteen months at the top secret security interrogation prison MFS Hohenschonhausen (East Berlin) and eight months a la Solzhenitsyn at the work camp Bautzen near the Czech border...