Death of a comrade writer

Dear Pouring Rain,

I didn’t want to come on the keyboard today, but couldn’t stop myself. Hope you are well, living happy and a prosperous life. I kept waiting for a reply from your end, and it’s routine now, but you are not turned up.

I just came across the news Great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn is no more. There are many reasons for me to remember Mr. Solzhenitsyn. Long time back, while rummaging book shelves in a library, in Kolkata, I was a lucky chap to get “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. I was glad to read it. Before that, I didn’t know about Solzhenitsyn. It was a novel about the grisly realities in Soviet prisons and labor camps. It was Solzhenitsyn only, who brought the world attention and this affair brought him fame.

Dear friend, we can’t deny the fact that Solzhenitsyn was initially a loyal communist, before turning into a full time writer. He was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in a letter, to a friend. He managed to write this experience in his first book and became a famous figure in world literature overnight. Solzhenitsyn was a comrade in the true sense, so I gave the headline “Death of a comrade writer”, instead of “Death of a writer” or any other headline.

In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, Solzhenitsyn is the protagonist in the guise of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. He has been sentenced to a camp in the Soviet gulag system, accused of becoming a spy, after being captured by the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. He is innocent, but is nonetheless punished by the government for being a spy.

Dear Pouring Rain, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was a father figure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, but refused to travel to receive it for fear of not being allowed to return home. His another book, "The Gulag Archipelago” created a lot of hue and cry and he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 after the authorities discovered manuscripts of the book, from his home. In exile for nearly two decades, he became an icon of resistance to the totalitarian system that expelled him from his homeland. Most of the time he lived in US. He could return home in 1994 only. In Russia, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was remembered for his unwavering convictions, his fierce patriotism and the self-imposed isolation of his final years. But outside the country he is viewed as a writer who destroyed the myth of Stalin's Communist society and exposed the tyranny of the Soviet system.

My dear friend, I mentioned in my last post, I’m an ardent fan of Russian masters. They always lured me to read their creations. From Lev Tolstoy to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, there are number names, for them I would like to bow down. Death of a great writer has disturbed me. It’s a great loss of the world literature; we would be never ever able to fill up.

Now I’m going to sum up things. Need to leave now. Need to take some rest. Hope to see you soon.
Miss you!
Thanks & Regards
The Desert.