Word: solzhenitsyns
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...first. This week's issue features what we think are two notable examples of excellence and exclusivity. Correspondents Richard Behar and Scott Brown take a penetrating second look at the Exxon Valdez disaster. And in a special five-page section, Washington correspondent David Aikman talks with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the first major interview the Soviet writer has given to any U.S. news organization since...
Aikman jumped at the chance to interview Solzhenitsyn when the Soviet author sent word through his U.S. publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, that he would be willing to talk to TIME. Says Aikman: "For any student of Russian thought and literature in the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn towers above the landscape. He has done more to influence Western views of the Soviet Union than possibly anyone else since the Bolshevik Revolution...
...reclusive author, Aikman drove to Solzhenitsyn's home in Cavendish, Vt. "Solzhenitsyn's somewhat forbidding reputation as a stern social critic," says Aikman, "had not prepared me for the gracious host who bounded out of the house to greet me." The author's wife Natalya and their son Stepan, 15, listened in as Aikman conducted the 2 1/2-hour interview in Russian. When it was over, Aikman was invited to share an informal family lunch: Russian blinchiki (crepes stuffed with ground beef) prepared by Natalya...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn arrived in Cavendish with his wife Natalya and four sons in 1976, some 2 1/2 years after he had been charged with treason and forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union. Settling in at a 50-acre mountain retreat, purchased with royalties from Western publications of his works, the author of such books as Cancer Ward and The First Circle gradually disappeared from headlines and public view. Admiring pilgrims hoping for a glimpse of the 1970 Nobel laureate -- as well as suspected KGB snoops -- were discouraged by the natives and by an impressive security system ringing the enclosure...
These outward signs of reclusiveness prompted much speculation. What was Solzhenitsyn doing in his bucolic isolation? After 13 years, an answer is finally emerging, and it is mind boggling. Aided by Natalya ("I don't think I could have done it without my wife"), he has constructed a virtual factory of literature. Laboring nearly twelve hours a day, seven days a week in a three- story building behind his house that serves both as a workplace and library and as a typesetting and proofreading center, he has produced more than 5,000 printed pages in Russian of an epic called...