Greatest mind of our times

Simon Caterson writing in The Australian, August 09, 2008

NEXT to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, most authors, even some of his fellow Nobel prize winners, seem frivolous. Perhaps no other writer of the past 100 years has managed to carry the same combination of moral, political and literary weight.
Yet when his first and most famous book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962, Solzhenitsyn was an obscure schoolteacher in his mid-40s. At that time in Russia, writing could lead to years in a Siberian labour camp, or worse. Solzhenitsyn had many years of life-threatening personal experience of the Gulag, memories of which formed the basis for Ivan Denisovich and other great works.

By the time of his death early this week, Solzhenitsyn had reportedly sold more than 30 million copies of his books in 40 languages and was credited with helping to change the course of world history. The tale of his rise to become one of the most influential people of our time is in its way stranger than fiction, and certainly at odds with the idea of literature as just a form of entertainment, or the notion, pervasive in the West, of writing as a kind of self-therapy.

Read Caterson's full piece at The Australian online.