The Solzhenitsyn Files
by Michael Scammell (Ed), Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
This collection of material is an extraordinary demonstration of how much writers mattered in the Soviet Union. If you were a writer you sort of … mattered. Solzhenitsyn said that in the West a writer could go to the top of a mountain and flap his arms about like mad and nobody would take any notice, but in the Soviet Union if a writer stirred his hand in a certain way it sent shock waves through the viscous air.
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“This is something of a curiosity. 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.” Read more...
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Michael Nicholson, Literary Scholar
