Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Solzhenitsyn's account of the fate of prisoners' wives is the most sorrowing part of The First Circle. His cool realism is suffused with a rush of personal grief as he describes Gleb Ner-zhin's Nadya: waiting outside prisons for a glimpse of her husband, allowed rare letters and rarer visits, herself persecuted whenever her relationship to a prisoner is discovered?and, finally, driven to divorce in self-defense. (Solzhenitsyn's own wife, Natalya, divorced him at his urging while he was in prison. She remarried and bore two children, but after his release she divorced her second husband...
...Banish Kapitalizm. Solzhenitsyn is a rare master of the Russian language ?not the debased, impenetrably formula-ridden Russian produced by two decades of Stalinist newspapers, schoolbooks and speeches, but the rich mother Russian that calls on all the ancient, all the regional, and all the poetic
...prisoner-scientists in The First Circle insists on attempting what he calls "plain speech," in which non-Russian words are banished, even if puzzling archaisms must be substituted. For example, he replaces the Latin-root word kapitalizm with the old Russian word for usury, tolstosumstvo (literally, "moneybaggism"). Solzhenitsyn himself has proposed that Russian be purified in this way. His strongly held views on language not only contribute great power and control to his writing but are also typical of other attitudes that pervade his work and his life: he is profoundly attached to all things traditionally Russian, is indeed...
Irreparably Deluded. Solzhenitsyn escaped his prison hell on March 5, 1953, when he was released after serving his eight-year sentence. On the first day of his freedom, the local radio carried the bulletin announcing Stalin's death. Even though out of the camp, he still had to live in exile in Siberia. He began putting down on paper the stories he had worked over in his mind during his imprisonment...
...rough-and-ready operation for cancer. The disease now became acute again. Near death, he made his way to a hospital in Tashkent, where the tumor was arrested. The experience gave rise to Cancer Ward, a weaker book than his others. Yet the book rises toward the end to Solzhenitsyn's most direct statement of the complicity of everyone in the guilt of the past: "It's shameful, why do we take it calmly until we ourselves or those who are close to us are stricken? ... If no one is allowed for decade after decade to tell...