One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

"Yes let’s do that as I’ve quite a lot to say about old Solzh. It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in.’ After One Day in the Life , Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago . When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976. The curious position is that we can handle the terror, but the worst thing isn’t the terror, it’s not the torture or the killing of millions, as Stalin did; in a way it’s simply the intrinsic nastiness of the regime which is still not quite understood (a real key is the film The Lives of Others ). After One Day in the Life , Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago . When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976. Solzhenitsyn was great fun – none of that haggard and fanatical effect you get in the photographs, but an easy, warm atmosphere. I was relieved to find him a great Conquest fan, with tales of how he and Sakharov read The Great Terror together. We ended up after four hours with bear-like hugs, kisses on the cheeks, raspy beard and all. As I was leaving, he asked if I would translate ‘a little poem’ of his. I said yes, and it turned out to be 2000 words long, about his experiences in East Prussia during the war (later published in both languages as Prussian Nights ). I am still asked by his widow Natalia to come to Moscow events celebrating him. Well, it’s difficult to say. He certainly wasn’t a liberal; he was more on the patriotic right. What he would say is, ‘Russia has to get rid of that awful past’, which doesn’t go down well with run-of-the-mill super-patriots. But now that position is erratically supported by the official regime, which is a big change."