The London Telegraph | A N Wilson | July 16, 2007

One Nobel prizewinner who is thoroughly deserving of his laurel crown is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Last week I was writing about Heinrich Böll, and it was he who welcomed Solzhenitsyn to the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974. It was one of those moments of televised news one never forgets.

Even without knowing very much about Solzhenitsyn, everyone who saw it must have been overpoweringly moved by it. One knew instinctively that this was a great man, a great person. Maybe, by the strictest standards of Russian prose, he isn’t a great stylist. “Provincial physics teacher!” sniffed Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, when I met her and tried to get her to talk about Solzhenitsyn. “Provincial physics teacher does not, I think, write good Russian!”

advertisementThere are times, however, when truthfulness is more important than style. When Solzhenitsyn came out of the USSR to be met by the cameras, the whole ghastly world of the Gulag (now brilliantly chronicled by the historian Anne Applebaum) was largely unknown to the West, save through his patient recollections, in such works as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle.

Seized by an urge to reread him lately, I turned to various big bookshops and did not find a single volume of Solzhenitsyn on the shelves. (In one fairly big Waterstone’s, the assistant had clearly never heard of him!) I have scoured the Oxfam bookshops and made good the deficit. The first tome I devoured was Cancer Ward, which is evidently autobiography, based on his experiences of being released from the camps and finding himself in a cancer clinic in the back of beyond in Uzbekistan. It is an overpoweringly wonderful book.

All week, the comings and goings of “real” people in my life have been shadowy. At meals, it has been as if I were eating with Homeric wraiths. The flesh-and-blood people were the ones in my head - the appalling, bigoted Stalinist Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a KGB officer who comes to be treated for a tumour on his neck, and who leaves at the end believing he is cured. (We know otherwise, and his sickness is, if not a parable, an emblem of the sickness of the Communist state.)

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