Monday, August 4th - One Day In the Life of ...

So today I am going all PBS/NPR on your blogbutts, because a literary giant and a true icon against oppression and totalitarianism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died over the weekend.

I first read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" as a required summer reading for AP English my senior year in high school, and it is one of those books that haunts you and stays with you for a very long time.  Since Czarist Russia had always held quite a bit of fascination for me and even knowing the basic subject matter of the novel, I was looking forward to reading that novel more than any other from the list (in fact, I don't think I even recall what else was on it), however, as I got further into the book, I was crushed by the decent into madness that was the post-Lenin Soviet Union.  "Denisovich" is a chronicle of the brutality and humiliation that prisoners in gulags were subjected to on a daily basis, and the fact that it was semi-autobiographical, since Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a prison camp for public and private criticism of Stalin, only made the book all the more horrifying.  It makes one wish that George W. Bush, if he could comprehend it without pictures and pop ups, had read it before his administration decided that America was going to get into the business of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union, and he eventually settled in Vermont of all places.  He returned to Russia in 1994 after the Union collapsed.  Even though in his waning years he took on the aura of a crumudgeon and kook, "Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipeligo" will forever stand as a tribute to his strength of mind and character that he did not allow himself to be broken under such abusive conditions.