Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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.
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.
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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.
