Word: solzhenitsyns
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Preparations for the solemn, glittering ceremony that was to honor this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature halted abruptly in Stockholm last week. In Moscow, Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn called at the Swedish embassy to inform Ambassador Gunnar Jarring that he would not be making the journey to Stockholm. Earlier, the writer had expressed his determination to attend the Nobel festivities Dec. 10, "as far as it depends on me." But denunciations of him in the Soviet press have climaxed in the charge that the writer, a twice-decorated war hero, was a Nazi sympathizer...
...crush talented peopleor anyone for that matter?" Rostropovich continued: "Every man should have the right to think and express himself independently, and without fear, about the things he knows, believes personally and has lived through." The cellist was speaking of his beleaguered friend Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he has been harboring in his dacha near Moscow while a vitriolic press campaign rages against...
Evidently fearing that Solzhenitsyn will be prevented from journeying to Stockholm on Dec. 10 to accept his Nobel Prize, Rostropovich ridiculed the Kremlin's wildly fluctuating attitudes toward the award. He noted that when it was given to Boris Pasternak in 1958, and to Solzhenitsyn this year, it was regarded as "a dirty political game." But when Stalinist Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov was honored in 1965, it was seen as "a just recognition of the world significance of our literature." About Solzhenitsyn's banned novels, Rostropovich said: "He has suffered for the right to write the truth...
...hell and savage their brothers for a bread crumb. But the bulk of men remain the same, irretrievably wedded to their petty vices and their tepid virtues. For them, the prison camp is a change in milieu, not a change in character. Such is the breadth and depth of Solzhenitsyn's vision that he chooses to be the voice of these voiceless and mediocre many. Without ever resorting to formal religious terminology, he says in effect that each of these humdrum souls is precious and equal in the sight of God and ought to be so treated. This...
Russia, finally, is Solzhenitsyn's subject. It is often assumed, in some simple-minded way, that Russia is a nation that fell into the hands of a few evil men drugged with ideology, or that its people had some insatiable appetite for being ruled by ogres. Neither is true. Russia was largely untouched by the twin lights of the Reformation and Rennaissance. But just as the blind are known to develop extraordinary capacities in their other senses, so Russia has been similarly graced. Decade after decade, her greatest writers form an apostolic succession of the alerted conscience. They have...