A brilliant, strange man and one of the few writers who changed history. Who can forget One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago?
Roger L. Simon
Blacklisting Myself Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror
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 With gratitude to the readers of this blog without whom my new -- and first non-fiction -- book would likely never have been written.
Simon's first non-fiction book - Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in an Age of Terror - Pub. date: February 5, 2009 |
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4 Comments
1. srlucado:As one of about ten people who’ve actually read all three volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago”, I’m sorry to hear that he has passed away.
Thanks to him, I went on to read a great many other Russian writers, becoming a lifelong Tolstoy junkie. (I’ve read “War and Peace” nine times so far.)
Solzhenitsyn opened the eyes of a great many people in the West–not only to abuses in the Soviet system, but to the undying human spirit that shines through adversity, a theme in much of his work, whether it be “The Love Girl and the Innocent”, “The Cancer Ward” (my personal favorite), or “The First Circle”. (”August 1914″ – well, the less said the better, I suppose.)
May he rest in peace. I hope that he, Goncharov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin are having conversations up in the great literary club in the sky.
Scott
Aug 3, 2008 - 7:07 pm 2. chrisarabia:I agree completely on Cancer Ward and with RLS that Solzhy was not the most familiar man. I once spoke approvingly of him in the company of some Russians and they didn’t concur; from what I recall, somebody said something about his weird worldview and tendency to conjure his own words in Russian.
I read Volume 1 of the Gulag Archipelago–fascinating but probably the heaviest thing I’ve ever read (in the dense, not 60s, sense of heavy).
Aug 4, 2008 - 12:34 am 3. OregonGuy:A life changing author.
How can you not read Cancer Ward and come away with a new weariness with all those who advocate for the benefit of the prole.
Ivan and Gulag.
And yet it was, and is, inspiring to me that his words were passed, written out longhand, in secret. And that we had a chance to find them and read them.
Truly, one of the world’s finest writers.
Aug 4, 2008 - 4:30 pm 4. buddy larsen:.
His vision of the meaning of western pop culture, coming to us from a Russian anti-communist, was so selfless and counter-propagandic that it took flight into poetry and metaphor — even now it’s in my memory as a distant clear bell tolling behind the 70s &80s wall-of-sound. Something i as a creature of the times knew i had to ignore or else it would mess up Saturday Nite.
Aug 6, 2008 - 9:30 am