Solzhenitsyn fails to enthuse Gen Y

MOSCOW: A decade after the influential author’s death, some young Russians admit to only a passing knowledge of Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won a Nobel Prize for chronicling the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. “Solzhenitsyn was a dissident, someone who opposed the Soviet regime and he was a great writer,” summed up Alexander Polyakovsky, 23, an international relations student.

He admits he has not read any of the author’s books. “They talked about him a bit when I was at high school, during the Russian literature lessons, but I don’t remember too much,” he added. Rather than hearing about Solzhenitsyn from teachers, “it was my mother who told me he was one of the greatest writers of 20th century,” Polyakovsky said.

By contrast, his mother Yelena emotionally described how she discovered one of Solzhenitsyn’s works hidden among the family's books during the Soviet era. “I was a teenager and my parents drilled it into me that I mustn't tell anyone we had the book at home. It was a forbidden fruit," she said. “It was such a different era that it's hard for my son to imagine it,” she added, explaining his lack of interest.

Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008, at 89. He shot to fame in the USSR with 1962 novella, the first in Soviet literature to describe life in a prison camp, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, based on his own experiences of seven years in jail for criticising Stalin. Solzhenitsyn’s widely read, “The Gulag Archipelago”, a lengthy chronicle of the workings of Soviet terror, sold millions of copies.