Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews ‘Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’ by Liudmila Saraskina · LRB 11 September 2008

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews ‘Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’ by Liudmila Saraskina · LRB 11 September 2008
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Most of all, though, I warmed to Solzhenitsyn. What a fighter! What an incorrigible conspirator, and how infectious the enjoyment he got out of it! (His exclamation marks are infectious, too.) What a sense of theatre and timing! How unshakeable in his belief that he was always right, regardless of the occasional 180º turn! What a subverter of other people’s pieties (sometimes even his own)! How wickedly good at puncturing the self-regard of the intelligentsia! What a master of black humour!! What a polemical style!! ...

[For me Solzhenitsyn was a defender of the inalienable rights of each human being to BE. He never bowed to the chaotic, random evil octupus wood-chipper machine of socialism which reels the young and the poor in with the fishing line of immorality and rebellion. He laughed in the face of that vacuous empty pomposity with its red penchant for the blood of innocents which still scream from even the tiny pebbles ground in its monstrosity. No one was able to destroy the giftedness of his intellect which he humbly submitted to the use of his Creator for 'our' defense. He is still a hero to me, a gift given in the beginning of my university days. His rarefied view clarified everything.]