“The Truth That the Reader So Longed for” On the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Academician A.I. Solzhenitsyn

Abstract

In 2018, the birthday of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was included in the UNESCO calendar of commemoration days. The world remembers the writer not only as a creative personality but also as a fighter for truth and freedom of speech. His story about one day in the life of a Soviet prisoner, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, became the most important event in the country after N.S. Khrushchev’s historic speech at the 20th party congress, having largely predetermined the present-day ideas about the Soviet past and influenced the modern historical belle lettres. After the publication of Ivan Denisovich and the award of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn, the writer was officially recognized as a major figure in international literature. Interest in him among Western intellectuals was largely predetermined by the general idea of the Russian classics, which stood against the policy of the official authorities in the name of protecting human values. Today, when the writer’s life and creativity have come to an end, a new stage in the study of his legacy has been reached, and it may be termed as a “return to the eternity” of international culture and thought.