Days in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

• Author: Morgan, Patrick
• Pages: 65(3)

The last great figure of the 20th century, the Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died on August 3rd. He first came to prominence with the publication of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. This was part of Khrushchev's post-Stalin thaw. The vast array of Soviet camps, of which Solzhenitsyn himself had been an inmate, had been known about for decades, but for Soviet readers this was one of the first public acknowledgements of their existence. The novel has the effect of putting its reader through the wringer--reliving one day in the life of one prisoner is more gruelling than the mere knowledge that countless millions had been so treated.

From then on Solzhenitsyn never ceased to be a public figure as well as a writer. He was the first major Soviet dissident, and a group of like-minded citizens followed in his footsteps, creating the first crack in the ice floe, an essential precondition for the eventual collapse of the evil empire of the Soviets.

Solzhenitsyn's greatest literary achievement was the novel The First Circle, in which he showed that in a totalitarian society everyone was simultaneously both a victim of the system, but also potentially an oppressor who transmitted the regime's contagion. Even Stalin himself was a...