Joyful occasions have rarely been granted Russia's great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His life, like his work, is a chronicle of disaster: prison, concentration camps, exile, cancer and relentless persecution by the Soviet authorities. Still, one exhilarating moment came last year when news arrived from Stockholm that he had won the world's most prestigious literary award, the Nobel Prize. "I am thankful," he said with feeling to Per Egil Hegge, then correspondent for Oslo's Aftenposten, who phoned him the glad tidings in Moscow.
Hegge now reports that the Nobel prizewinner's joy was soon blighted-not so much by the leaders of the Soviet...