Word: solzhenitsyns
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ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN refused to believe it. Even though his friends told him last week that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Russia's greatest living writer, whose works are banned in the Soviet Union, remained incredulous. The friends, who normally shield his whereabouts carefully from outsiders, finally told a Norwegian correspondent in Moscow how he could reach Solzhenitsyn by telephone. Per Egil Hegge of Oslo's Aftenposten immediately called him to confirm the news. Then Hegge asked the author for a comment...
...first Solzhenitsyn demurred, but the reporter persisted. "The world is interested in your reaction," Hegge said. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed to draft a statement, which he then read to Hegge. "I accept the prize," said Solzhenitsyn. "As far as it will depend on me, I intend to receive the prize in person on the traditional day." To make sure no one could say that he was too ill to travel, Solzhenitsyn added: "I am in good health...
...motion a showdown that will pit the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin against a lone and indomitable man who has become a hero of Russia's growing dissident movement and a symbol to those of his countrymen who yearn for greater artistic freedom. Even as Solzhenitsyn, 51, and his wife Natalya celebrated the award with friends at a party outside Moscow in the little wooden dacha of Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, hard-lining Soviet literary bureaucrats were preparing an attack on him. Under the heading "An Unseemly Game," the Soviet Writers' Union, which reflects the Kremlin...
...start of the attack is frighteningly similar to the one in 1958, when Boris Pasternak was ultimately forced to reject the prize and in the later stages was reviled by party-lining writers as, among other things, "a pig who fouled the spot where he ate." The Solzhenitsyn affair, however, is potentially far more serious. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was less a political novel than a lyrically philosophical view of the effects of the Revolution on the lives of people. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn's main works (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First...
...ultimately cowed not so much by threats against him as by those against his great love Olga Ivinskaya, who was the model for Lara. He feared that she would be without protection if he left Russia, and those fears were borne out when she was imprisoned after his death. Solzhenitsyn, who served eight years in Stalin's prison camps, is unlikely to break in the face of threats to himself or his relations. "No one can block the road to truth," he has said. "In order to advance it, I am willing to accept even death...