Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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.
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.
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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.
