Book description
Giovanni Solzhenitsyn has used Solzhenitsyn to illustrate the history of the Russian literary intelligentsia since 1917, with special emphasis on the period after 1946. With reference to speeches, books, resolutions, minutes and articles published clandestinely and in exile, Dr Grazzini reveals the appalling conditions under which Soviet writers have to work, controlled by the Kremlin’s Glavlit and the whims of carefully indoctrinated editors, ignorant of literature and subservient to every change in doctrinal wind.
By openly criticising this tyranny, defending the writer’s duty in spite of persecution, refusing to recant any of his comments and publicly scorning the neo-Stalinists, Solzhenitsyn has emerged as a great and courageous man as well as a literary genius.
