The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center's blog for following the latest developments related to the author, his writings, and his legacy.
Yevgeni Vodolazkin
Today in Moscow it was announced that Yevgeni Vodolazkin has won the 2019 Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize for organically combining the deep Russian tradition of spiritual and psychological prose with outstanding achivement in language arts, as well as for his inspired writing style. The award ceremony will be held on 18 April.
In today’s Moscow Times, Emily Couch describes her visit to the new museum off Tverskaya Street, in the apartment where Solzhenitsyn lived and from which he was led away to his second arrest (and expulsion to the West) on 12 February 1974.
“The museum is a veritable shrine to the great Russian author, featuring everything from the jacket he wore in the Kazakhstan prison camp to copies of his children’s homework that he, himself, corrected.
It is comprised of seven rooms, each representing a different period of Solzhenitsyn’s life. Aside from the necessary additions of information plaques and glass cases, the apartment has been left much as it was during his lifetime. The final room, representing the author’s return to Russia in the 1990s, has a photograph showing the author sitting at the desk looking much the same now as it did then. The entrance hall from which the author was arrested, Dasha noted, still boasts the original parquet flooring. ”
An interesting perspective yesterday on teaching Solzhenitsyn, from Solzhenitsyn biographer Joseph Pearce.
“In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as “essential reading”: “Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.” Since it is utterly unthinkable that Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communist classic would ever be adopted as required reading in the socialist-dominated high school system in the United States, we can see that Russian high school students are getting a much better education in the evils of communism than are American high schoolers.”
A review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1 from San Francisco Book Review on 7 February.
“In the Soviet Union, he spoke out against the government. As an exile, he no longer has a reason or motivation to speak out. He is more of his country than of the western world, and yet he is endlessly pursued by a ravenous press corps eager for the latest statement by a famous defector. He wants to make a home for his family, and he has an obligation to order his life and papers. He is a writer with a necessarily solitary occupation, yet he is put upon by outside forces that feel to him as inexorable as Soviet oppression. He does not yearn for a western life. He aches for freedoms in his country. He is a man between worlds, without a country. This will be enjoyed by serious readers of this author.”
Over at Law & Liberty, Richard Reinsch reviews Between Two Millstones, Book 1.
“Solzhenitsyn remained a Russian patriot. His literary mission was the restoration of his homeland to a condition of liberty and flourishing that Leninist-Stalinism destroyed. This is the ultimate truth of the recently released English edition of Book 1 of Between Two Milestones, which is Solzhenitsyn’s account of his forced exile in the West in 1974.
And by noting that atheism is the animating core of Marxism and its persecution of Christians in Russia, Solzhenitsyn touched a different nerve: that of the unofficial atheism in the chattering classes of Western capitals.
His opposition to a full tilt capitalist industrial economy should have earned him at least style points with his detractors. Except that he didn’t exactly frame it in the messianic environmental language they preferred. Solzhenitsyn spoke of self-limitation and curbing appetites and desires as much as he spoke of ecological harm. The environmental and human devastation wrought by Soviet industrial policy must have played a role in his thinking. How could it not?
From his adopted home in Cavendish he wrote prodigiously, and upcoming editions of the Notre Dame Press catalog will bear witness to it, including Book II of his exile memoirs. Upon returning to a fledgling post-communist Russia in 1994, he thanked the people of Cavendish at, where else, their town assembly. There is genuine gratitude expressed by Solzhenitsyn in this short address for the freedoms and flourishing enjoyed in the Green Mountain State. His children had grown up strong. The Solzhenitsyn’s had found their measure in Vermont, in America. Perhaps the Russian patriot touched the best of our own country while here.
”
