[Rummyfan]

[Theodore R.]

Even one as wise as Solzhenitsyn must be surprised at how much the American people seem poised to embrace communism in 2020 or 2022.

[Pelham]

“Harsher and more numerous were his critics on the left, many of whom seemed offended that Solzhenitsyn’s humanism was not of a secular kind but derived instead from the Christian beliefs of his early youth to which he had returned.”

“Criticism intensified particularly after Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard University commencement address in 1978, in which he assailed with his usual vigor aspects of mediocrity and decadence in Western culture.”

[Fred Hayek]

I had read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” when I was in middle school. Right about the time when Brezhnev invaded Czechoslovakia.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Larry Lucido]

From Wikipedia:

Once back in Russia (after 1990) Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program.[66] Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995.

*************

If only he could have gotten hold of that Merv Griffin set. And maybe booked Yuri Testikov as a guest once or twice.

[submarinerswife]

Read the whole thing. Great story.

Thanks for posting this.

[Altura Ct.]

Live not by lies.

Which we here in America seem prone to do.

[rlmorel]

One of the most impactful and influential books I ever read.

Explained the deep, dark evil inherent in the Soviet Union in a way anyone could understand.

[heartwood]

Al Stewart wrote a song inspired by Solzhenitsyn: The Road to Moscow

And although the video has pictures from WW2, there is also a 19th c. painting by Isaak Levitan worth contemplating: Vladmirka Road (The Road of Exiles)

Find a full screen image to get a sense of that endless, empty country.

[PGalt]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

[gattaca]

bmp

[Spaghetti Man]

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.