Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

摘要

I met aleksandr solzhenitsyn at his home in Vermont in 1993, through his eldest son, with whom I went to college. It was snowing hard, and he came in from the small separate house he used as his study to join the family for dinner. He looked a hit gruff, but his eyes were kind. He asked me what my major was, and I told him it was literature. "What kind?" he asked. "English," I said. He said, "There are other kinds of literature, you know." We were standing in the living room, and I looked at the shelves full of foreign editions of The Gulag Archipelago and at the writer with the biblical beard and piercing gaze and thought perhaps I should consider studying Russian. I went to Moscow in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union and a year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile.