In his detailed account of the Soviet prison camp system and the suffering it afflicted on millions, the Russian dissident exposed to the world the evil at the heart of communism. It never fails to put my own problems in perspective when I recall the life of a prisoner, or zek, trying to survive in a Soviet prison camp.īack in my 20s, I read the first two (of three) volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, one of the most important literary works of the 20 th century. His writings remind me what’s important in life and to never take our blessings and freedoms for granted. In his fiction and non-fiction, he portrays ordinary human characters living and dying in an inhuman system. Solzhenitsyn is one of my favorite authors. A Christian brother recommended it three decades ago, telling me that it was so vivid in its portrayal of patients in a Soviet hospital in the 1950s that he felt like he had cancer himself. One book I’ve finished on this RV trip is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward.
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