Russia: Silence for Solzhenitsyn

Russia's greatest living writer is very seldom read these days in his own country. A former prison camp inmate whose evocative historical novels have dealt bluntly with the repressions of the Stalin era, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is excluded from official Moscow literary circles. He lives on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ryazan under the shadow of a Soviet campaign to discredit him. Though his major works (The Cancer Ward and The First Circle) are widely read abroad, they have never been published in Russia. Nor have any of his short stories appeared in the Soviet Union during the...

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