Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is easy to think that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” the book that helped to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, was a contemporary of yet another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky. They both lived in cursed “interesting times,” Dostoevsky at the end time of the Czars, and Solzhenitsyn at a time when Soviet communism began to stink in men’s nostrils. Dostoevsky, the author of “Poor Folk”, imprisoned by the Czar for subversive activity, was sent packing to Siberia, where he spent several years in the harsh Russian winters concocting “The House of the Dead,” his fictional novel that drew on his prison years. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for subversive activity by modernity’s version of the Czars, the Politburo, and he spent his time concocting “A Day in the Life of Ivan Desenovich,” which drew on his prison years. A faithful biographer of Dostoevsky, tells us that the Czar had arranged a tormenting send off for those early socialists, writers...