Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 12 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
Tell me about Michael Scammell’s biography of Solzhenitsyn.
This was the first biography of Solzhenitsyn (we’re now on about the fourth, I think) and it was written at a time in the 1970s when really not very much was known about him. Scammell had some access to Solzhenitsyn and was able to ask a few questions in interviews he did in the 1970s. He was one of the first to see some of Solzhenitsyn’s early works, but Solzhenitsyn got fed up of the questioning and relations cooled. Then when he saw the nature of the final book they cooled even further. It’s a Western-style biography by a liberal, cautious admirer who wanted to give a balanced view. Other later biographers largely piggy-backed off this one but then, in 2008, came this whopping great book by Saraskina.
The Lyudmila Saraskina is presumably not Western-style?
Not at all. The family gave her pretty much unlimited access and support and she opens with a chapter about the role of the biographer, making very clear that she is going to be a loyal chronicler of the life of someone she hugely admires. It’s a very pugnacious book, clearing the record. There has been a lot of bizarre nonsense said about Solzhenitsyn, not least in Russia, and she sets out to put the record straight. She finished within a few months of his death and has since updated the book to include the time right up to his death. It’s full of marvellous things that she got straight from the family.
What kind of thing?
Well, she refers to a document that Solzhenitsyn is known to have been working on with a friend and that incriminated him at the time of his arrest [in 1945]. Passionate Leninist that he was, he was critical, though not explicitly, of the Stalinist line and he proposed a new line. This is a document that Scammell and others have referred to, but the original was retrieved from his interrogation document during perestroika and it was sent to Solzhenitsyn in exile in Vermont by Gorbachev himself. So Saraskina was able to quote it at length in her book.
Tell me about The Solzhenitsyn Files, the old politburo stuff released from the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This is something of a curiosity really. It was part of that rush of archival material that suddenly became available at the end of the Soviet period, and the Russian editors filtered through a mass of politburo stuff concerning Solzhenitsyn and produced this intriguing book. You see, back in the 1970s, whenever any foreign journalists asked about Solzhenitsyn and what was happening to him, the official Soviet line was: “Look, you admire him as a writer, but do you really think the Soviet leadership is going to waste its time agonizing over one writer? Do you really think Brezhnev/Andropov is actually sitting around talking about a novelist?” That approach worked pretty well in the West because nobody could imagine the US President holding a meeting about what to do about Updike.
But then came these archives and you’ve got Andropov and other leaders, phone conversations and transcripts of meetings, and they all are sitting around talking about Solzhenitsyn and what to do about him. The archives cover some of the scurrilous fabrications that came out concerning him (books and articles purportedly by friends denouncing him and smearing his reputation both morally and otherwise) but there’s no reference, unfortunately, to the ticklish issue of his attempted assassination in the early 1970s.
Dr Nicholson is Dean of University College, Oxford, and is Fellow and Praelector in Russian, specialising in late 20th-century Russian literature. He tells The Browser that writers really were important in the Soviet Union and that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was not Solzhenitsyn’s first book.
Hitchens confronts his estrangement from his own brother, the journalist Peter Hitchens
Beautiful, thoughtful explication of a working life. "I chase down words. And by placing these words in alphabetical order and by naming and defining and providing a word-based background for their existence I create a book"
A look back at the unhappy life and works of Flann O'Brien, now heralded as one of Ireland's most original fiction writers. "He nursed a combination of arrogance and self-hatred, exacerbated by booze and a Manichean sense of doom"
Brief but brilliant. A fabulous vignette. The scene: An exclusive, allegedly anti-Semitic country club in Palm Beach. Christopher Hitchens is shown to a table in the middle of the dining room...
