The death last year of Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded westerners of the ideological disturbances that wracked the just completed century, the greatest of which Solzhenitsyn himself had documented in The Gulag Archipelago and in his novelistic cycle The Red Wheel. The literature of the Communist tyranny in Russia, of its internal and exported violence, bulks large, even when one considers it only in terms of English translations. In addition to Solzhenitsyn, we have Gulag memoirs by Yevgeniya Ginsburg and Lev Rozgan, biographies of victims by their survivors such as Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two books about the persecution and imprisonment of her husband Ossip, and generically difficult-to-assign items like Testimony, the conversations of composer Dmitri Shostakovich with Solomon Volkov. One might easily count hundreds of titles crying out to be read.P. D. Ouspensky and the Nightmare of Revolution
Thursday, 12 February 2009
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2009-02-10 12:23
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