A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, appeared 60 years ago this month. Vividly portraying a normal day in the life of a Gulag prisoner, it was followed by Solzhenitsyn’s two great anti-Stalinist novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), which helped establish the Soviet dissident-in-excelsis as a modern-day Tolstoy and a darling of the Cold War West.
Soon after that, in 1975, came the third and final part of The Gulag Archipelago, his mighty takedown of the Soviet system. In the words of French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, it caused ‘a worldwide earthquake’, dissolving the ‘Communist dream…in the furnace of a book.’
Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as one of the most famous writers in the world was confirmed. Yet it is arguably what happened to Solzhenitsyn afterwards, in the three and a half decades before his death in 2008, that has a greater bearing on events in Russia and Ukraine this year.
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