Hillel Italie: Solzhenitsyn Changed Story of Soviet Union
[Hillel Italie is AP National Writer.]
The legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn serves as a reminder that books can matter as much as life and death.
Solzhenitsyn never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them.
"Writers are a problem, they are a great problem, thank God," said Jason Epstein, a longtime editor at Random House who worked with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and others. "Without them, we would be lost."
Solzhenitsyn's works, many set in Stalinist prison camps, were documents of persecution; his life was an example. Few writers, in any century, so painfully lived through and recorded the events of his time. A front-line artillery captain in World War II, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin and served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.
A change in leadership -- the 1964 ousting of Nikita Khrushchev -- again made him an enemy. When his epic study of the Soviet prison system, "The Gulag Archipelago," was published, he was arrested and deported. "Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it," he once wrote. "Mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East."
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose work challenged the apartheid regime, said Solzhenitsyn's death was a "tremendous loss" to literature. "But one can only be glad that there is this marvelous array of work," she said. "The work remains for our times and all times. He was quite extraordinary in bringing to us so many examples of the confusion and pain in the world that we still see today and is very apposite in the early 21st century."
The end of the Cold War means that we may never go back to a time when one writer's fate could set off the superpowers. But the world remains alive with Solzhenitsyns, from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, put on trial in Turkey for referring to the mass slaughter of Armenians, to Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in 2006...
Read entire article at Moscow Times
The legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn serves as a reminder that books can matter as much as life and death.
Solzhenitsyn never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them.
"Writers are a problem, they are a great problem, thank God," said Jason Epstein, a longtime editor at Random House who worked with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and others. "Without them, we would be lost."
Solzhenitsyn's works, many set in Stalinist prison camps, were documents of persecution; his life was an example. Few writers, in any century, so painfully lived through and recorded the events of his time. A front-line artillery captain in World War II, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin and served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.
A change in leadership -- the 1964 ousting of Nikita Khrushchev -- again made him an enemy. When his epic study of the Soviet prison system, "The Gulag Archipelago," was published, he was arrested and deported. "Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it," he once wrote. "Mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East."
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose work challenged the apartheid regime, said Solzhenitsyn's death was a "tremendous loss" to literature. "But one can only be glad that there is this marvelous array of work," she said. "The work remains for our times and all times. He was quite extraordinary in bringing to us so many examples of the confusion and pain in the world that we still see today and is very apposite in the early 21st century."
The end of the Cold War means that we may never go back to a time when one writer's fate could set off the superpowers. But the world remains alive with Solzhenitsyns, from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, put on trial in Turkey for referring to the mass slaughter of Armenians, to Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in 2006...