A Farewell to Solzhenitsyn

Despite making the unforgivable mistake of forgetting to post my text to go with the picture in the last post, it still received more attention than all the other recent, more grammar-related posts. After all, even though we’d all really like to speak better Russian, it is no secret any more that it is this country’s literature and writers that make our hearts beat a little bit faster. And after reading through your comments on the death of Александр Исаевич Солженицын [Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn] I realized that we all have a personal relationship with this writer, our own point of view on him, a love affair of sorts with his works. I remember when I first started reading «Один день Ивана Денисовича» [“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”] in February 2005, just after arriving in Omsk, and the family that I lived with caught a glimpse of it. The mother’s first reaction was to ask me: «Почему ты читаешь эту книгу? Это очень грустная книга.» [“Why are you reading this book? It is a very sad book.”] I tried to explain to her that it was interesting to me, that I wanted to know about the past and that I had heard many things about the book, as well as about its author. My words didn’t make any difference to her, as she seemed to have made her mind up about him a long time ago about him – he was not her cup of tea (today [070808] Moscow Times published an interesting piece that throws some light upon how Russians themselves look at Solzhenitsyn: “Solzhenitsyn’s Troubled Prophetic Mission”). As for me, Solzhenitsyn holds a special place in my heart not so much for what he wrote, but for what he meant to my grandmother. She owned all of his books in Swedish, and when she passed away last year I was left with his entire production in translation. I made a promise to myself to read them all in time, but for now he is of importance to me mostly because he was my grandmother’s favorite writer.