Word: solzhenitsyns
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...went to Moscow in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union and a year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile. By then I had read Gulag, and every time I walked through the Byelorusskaya metro station, I thought of the first chapter, in which he describes his arrival in Moscow in 1945, 11 days after he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. He is escorted by three intelligence officers, but "not one of the three knew the city," he writes, "and it was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison...
...keep silent. His writing alternately saved and condemned him. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his searing account of the Soviet--labor camp experience, found favor during Khrushchev's thaw and was published in 1962. By the time the temperature chilled again, Solzhenitsyn's international fame was such that he could not be altogether dispensed with. In 1974, when the Brezhnev regime decided it would not tolerate the foreign publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and put on a plane. He breathed a little easier when the plane took off westward and not toward Siberia...
Whether at home or in exile, Solzhenitsyn was disciplined and unwavering. As a young man he had served a term of internal exile in Kazakhstan; deprived of writing supplies and the freedom to use them, he composed in his head, committing entire plays to memory. In Vermont, where he lived from 1976 to 1994, he kept a rigorous schedule. Bearing witness to millions of terrorized voices does not indulge writer's block, nor allow for vacations. It was a family affair. His wife Natalya, a gracious, fearless woman, made it her priority to ensure that he could work undisturbed...
...Solzhenitsyn published a memoir, Invisible Allies, in which he honors the people who helped him protect his writings from the state. It reads like a spy novel--coded messages, boxes with false bottoms--yet the danger was real. Were it not for these friends, from the fellow zeks (labor-camp inmates) who assisted him to the foreign journalists who smuggled out manuscripts, Gulag might not have seen the light...
Writers often speak of the courage it takes to face the blank page. Solzhenitsyn's courage was of a completely different order. Equally strong was his belief that the communist system he had so thoroughly damned in his work would collapse in his lifetime, allowing him to return home...