Michael Scammell is author of “Solzhenitsyn: A Biography”
(W.W. Norton, 1984).
Today, Wednesday, December 12, 2018 he has an op-ed in the
New York Times, p. A27, “The writer who beat an empire.” Solzhenitsyn started out with a novella “A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” about a Stalinist labor camp, where he (the
person) was sent to a labor camp for writing to a friend criticizing the soviet
system. As in early colonial America,
letters were read by authorities.
The little book was published in the west in 1962 by a small
literary magazine Novy Mir. Further autobiographical
novels would include “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward”, and then “The Gulag
Archipelago” in 1973. The Soviets
expelled him, and his arrival in the US out to prove to conservatives and especially
Trumpians the desirability of some immigration.
His writings helped bring down the Soviet Union in 1991. But Solzhenitsyn
did want a nationalist country with religious and conservative family values, rather
than Boris Yeltsin’s freewheeling republic, but he got what he wanted with
Putin in 2000.
The op-ed also discusses the clandestine publication of
Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” which had become a massive motion picture by
1966.
When I became a patient at NIH for the second half of 1962,
my roommate had a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky. We would scape
past the Cuban Missile Crisis will I was still a patient.
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