Just read it, comrade
That were the words of the same person:
He ticked off some of the Russian press's misrepresentations of Gulag. "I am alleged to have written that 'Hitler's Nazis were gracious and merciful to enslaved peoples.' All lies, Pravda comrades! Point out the exact pages! Tass says that in my autobiography I admitted my hatred of the Soviet system and people.
SOVIET UNION: Solzhenitsyn's Counterattack
Time Magazine. Monday, Jan. 28, 1974
And this is a citation from Gulag:Some of these girls had taken to heart what we had tirelessly dinned into them for fifteen years on end - that there is no such thing as one's own country, that the Fatherland is a reactionary fiction. Others had grown a little bored with our puritanical Lenten fare of meetings, conferences, and demonstrations, of films without kisses and dancing at arm's length. Yet others were won by politeness, by gallantry, by male attention to the niceties of dress and appearance and to the ritual of courtship, in which no one had trained the young men of our Five-Year Plan epoch, or the officers of Frunze's army. Others again were simply hungry - yes, hungry in the most primitive sense: they had nothing to put in their bellies. And perhaps there was a fifth group, who saw no other way of saving themselves and their relatives, of avoiding separation from their families.
In the town of Starodub, in Bryansk Province, where I arrived hot on the heels of the retreating enemy, I was told that a Hungarian gamson had been stationed there for a long time, to protect the town from partisan raids. Orders came transferring them elsewhere, and dozens of local women, abandoning all shame, went to the station and wept as they said goodbye to the occupying troops - wept more loudly, added a sarcastic shoemaker, than "when they had seen their own husbands off to the war.
There is no question about such a ridiculous description of the Soviet life, - description with diligence designated to the western reader. There is no question about that description of the people under the Nazi. The dastards way to put himself right after being too magnanimously treated during the War. Being a deserter he was not executed.
But there is one small catch… See above.
When I was reading that Nobel prize genuis in Russian I was wondering - do western publishing houses dare to translate his masterpieces literally after all the publicity they've made to him as to the creative person being tortured by bloody commies?
They do. No problem. That's just business.
Now you decide - who was the bigger liar: «Pravda comrades» or that person.
Conspiracy version: Solzhenitsyn really didn't write that. He was just too poor too ambitious too mentally sick too ungifted (even to translate from English into good Russian because his Russian is terrible). But honest. At least with that Time Magazin's journalist at least on Monday, Jan. 28, 1974.
But then… who was that guy who wrote all that incredibly fantastic true genuine (pardon my english) masterpieces?? >;)
He ticked off some of the Russian press's misrepresentations of Gulag. "I am alleged to have written that 'Hitler's Nazis were gracious and merciful to enslaved peoples.' All lies, Pravda comrades! Point out the exact pages! Tass says that in my autobiography I admitted my hatred of the Soviet system and people.
SOVIET UNION: Solzhenitsyn's Counterattack
Time Magazine. Monday, Jan. 28, 1974
And this is a citation from Gulag:Some of these girls had taken to heart what we had tirelessly dinned into them for fifteen years on end - that there is no such thing as one's own country, that the Fatherland is a reactionary fiction. Others had grown a little bored with our puritanical Lenten fare of meetings, conferences, and demonstrations, of films without kisses and dancing at arm's length. Yet others were won by politeness, by gallantry, by male attention to the niceties of dress and appearance and to the ritual of courtship, in which no one had trained the young men of our Five-Year Plan epoch, or the officers of Frunze's army. Others again were simply hungry - yes, hungry in the most primitive sense: they had nothing to put in their bellies. And perhaps there was a fifth group, who saw no other way of saving themselves and their relatives, of avoiding separation from their families.
In the town of Starodub, in Bryansk Province, where I arrived hot on the heels of the retreating enemy, I was told that a Hungarian gamson had been stationed there for a long time, to protect the town from partisan raids. Orders came transferring them elsewhere, and dozens of local women, abandoning all shame, went to the station and wept as they said goodbye to the occupying troops - wept more loudly, added a sarcastic shoemaker, than "when they had seen their own husbands off to the war.
There is no question about such a ridiculous description of the Soviet life, - description with diligence designated to the western reader. There is no question about that description of the people under the Nazi. The dastards way to put himself right after being too magnanimously treated during the War. Being a deserter he was not executed.
But there is one small catch… See above.
When I was reading that Nobel prize genuis in Russian I was wondering - do western publishing houses dare to translate his masterpieces literally after all the publicity they've made to him as to the creative person being tortured by bloody commies?
They do. No problem. That's just business.
Now you decide - who was the bigger liar: «Pravda comrades» or that person.
Conspiracy version: Solzhenitsyn really didn't write that. He was just too poor too ambitious too mentally sick too ungifted (even to translate from English into good Russian because his Russian is terrible). But honest. At least with that Time Magazin's journalist at least on Monday, Jan. 28, 1974.
But then… who was that guy who wrote all that incredibly fantastic true genuine (pardon my english) masterpieces?? >;)