During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]—Анна Андреевна Ахматова
I picked this up the other day. I first read it in English in 1975. Two very nice young men from Haverford College taught a class on Existential Literature at my alternative school where four students – only two of us regularly attended the class – read classics by Sarte, Camus, Dostoevsky. I remember being very affected by Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, I told the instructor that while in Pennsylvania it was autumn at the time and nights were cool, reading the book made me feel frozen cold. Yes, I remember he smiled in agreement. At that time the Soviet Gulag was far away. It was Communist, foreign. We were lucky to not be Soviet, luckier still to not have been sentenced to the Gulag. And in 2022 I think, well, here we are.
Apartment building of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner
