Word: solzhenitsyns
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Probably the most startling book to come out of Russia in recent years was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In massively compelling detail, it described the blighted existence of a prisoner in one of Stalin's detention camps at a time when the Soviet government had barely got around to admitting their existence. But Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years in just such a camp. And a question arose-was it impressive merely because it was autobiographically true? Now Solzhenitsyn's second book-a pair of short novels-has appeared. Even...
This time Solzhenitsyn's subjects are far less provocative - the life and death of an old peasant woman existing on the fringes of Soviet society; an incident between two soldiers in wartime. But in each, not so much from easy political resentment as from a profound accumulation of sorrow, Solzhenitsyn asks questions that challenge the validity of the whole Soviet system...
...regarded him as some kind of nut and sent him back to the university. He is troubled because the war is not following the victorious blueprint that Joseph Stalin always said it would. His only solace is reading Das Kapital. "The worse the news from the war became," writes Solzhenitsyn, "the more he buried himself in this thick blue book...
Last November the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir caused quite a stir by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch the first novel of an obscure mathematics teacher and former Red Army officer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Released with the express permission of Premier Khrushchev, One Day is a powerful, often humorous account of life in Stalin's forced labor camps. Translator Max Hayward, among others, hailed the novel as a "literary masterpiece" when it was published in the West several months later...
...relative liberality and boldness of Solzhenitsyn's story adds to the image of progressiveness deliberately fostered by the present regime. The editor of Novy Mir declares "This stark tale shows once again that today there is no aspect of our life that cannot be dealt with and faithfully described in Soviet literature." Here the image is more important than the reality: if Soviet citizens (and Western observers) can be convinced there is greatly enhanced cultural freedom, then the real state of affairs is not so important...