Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Solzhenitsyn's role in the consciousness?and conscience?of Russia began with One Day, which was published in 1962 on Khrushchev's order, for political reasons of his own. The book quickly took on an independent life. In cutting away the barbed wire of myth, in piercing the silence around the Stalin era, the book opened up the first frank discussion not only of the Soviet past but its present and future...
Essentially, Freedom. That book, and all of Solzhenitsyn's life and work, place him at the passionate focal point of the major issue that inflames dissent and frightens the men in the Kremlin today. The issue is Stalinism, the "past that is clawing to pieces our present days," as Soviet Writer Lydia Chukovskaya expressed it in a letter which circulated underground earlier this year...
Russia's present masters do not rule like Stalin; the camps of which Solzhenitsyn writes are mostly gone. But more and more Russians are beginning to realize that these men did share complicity in Stalin's crimes. And thousands of ordinary Russians were touched by guilt, because they let friends, neighbors, and members of their own families be taken away in the night without protesting. Could anything have been done to stop Stalin's police? Probably...
...there is the larger, guilt-laden problem of explaining to oneself how this could have happened in a revolutionary state created to end, in theory, the inhumanity of man to man. For this Russia, Solzhenitsyn's novels are both painful and healing. They expose every layer of Stalinist repression. And they are addressed, above all, to Russia and her people. Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms. Those who have not been through the agonies of the camps, the shocks of alternating...
...Solzhenitsyn believes that his mathematics saved him: he was next sent to Mavrino, a prison research institute outside Moscow. Mavrino is the setting of The First Circle. The title comes from Dante's Inferno, where the first circle of hell is peopled by the great men of antiquity?Homer, Socrates, Plato?who, too valuable to be thrown into the pit, were consigned to limbo. Mavrino is an institute carrying out KGB research projects, and as a prison it is bearable. There is meat. There is some comfort. There are even women. Yet this is still slave labor of the mind...