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Was I alone in thinking that he had died like, 40 years ago? I mean, I guess I just assummed that he had passed because I grew up seeing the Gulag Archipelago on my dad's library shelf, and those books looked like they had been old when he bought them.
I have a copy myself, and I just bought the first volume on audible about a week ago.... which seems strange to me. Maybe it was being advertised in anticipation of his death?
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I am about half way through "Gulag". It has so many modern day tie ins, from the debate about "Torture/Aggressive Interrogation" to the talk about "Activist Judges" (the Soviet Union judges were the opposite of activist. They upheld any law that their masters told them to.).
There is a lot of talk in the west about the bravery and sacrifice that the Russian people went through to defeat Hitler. Here the deaths are attributed more to their incompetence.
Great book. Fun read.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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One of the earliest "grown-up" books I ever picked up to read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was on a second to bottom shelf in my house's library and had very big, bold lettering. I think I was about five or six at the time. There were still plenty of concepts about the book I couldn't understand but I generally began to pick up on the fact that this was the life of a prisoner, an attempt to convey what a single day was. I remembered vivid scenes of how Ivan had to hack ice off a privy in order to go to the bathroom, about how he mechanically used bread edges to collect all the remnants of soup during mealtime. Of the labor in the cold, and the trading of cigarettes, even the butts. I eventually told my dad about the book and he was bemused to hear that I'd gone and picked that one up. Then, he told me that it was written by a guy from Russia who was attempting to capture what it was like to live life in a siberian gulag, and that these camps were very real things that existed in Russia, and that countless numbers of people had been shipped off to these places to toil and die.
Blew my little malformed brain. So I credit Solzhenitsyn with making me something of a stubborn social activist. A lot came out of reading that book, especially after re-reading it at eleven and getting way more out of it.
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quote:i wouldn't exactly call it "fun" read [Smile]
Au Contrair, I have never read about systemitized degradation, torture, pain, genocide, ethnic cleansing and bureaucratic socio-pathic organized brutal insanity with such good humor, irony, and satire, ever.
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There's something to be said for brutal realism. For all the ecstatic humor and wit of a Douglas Adams novel, Adams never did face the brutality of the world, or force his reader to do so.
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