Okay, a little time has passed since the death of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn so let’s start getting some perspective on this man and his work. For example, Solzhenitsyn has been compared to Fyodor Mikhaelvich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), and there certainly is some physical resemblance.
Both men faced many challenges in their lives. Both served time in prison. Both confronted serious illness. Both spent years in exile from their beloved Russia. And there are other interesting similarities. Unlike many writers, both these fellows were good at arithmetic. Solz was a mathematician and high school science teacher. Dost was trained as an engineer. (Dost disliked math, however, and even the very idea of math, for reasons beyond the scope of this sermon.) And both had mixed feelings, to say the least, about Europe and the West.
Of course, nobody can really compare with Dost. From his mock execution in his twenties to his speech about Pushkin a few months before he died, this guy could work it. At the Pushkin speech several people were so overcome that they fainted, and a garland was hung around the writer’s neck lettered, "From the women of Russia." I recommend a really great novel about Dost published in 2003. It’s called Summer in Baden-Baden, by Leonid Tsypkin.
When I first started thinking about Solz and Dost I believed it was going to be no contest, kind of like some of Mike Tyson’s early fights. But after looking into D.M. Thomas’ bio of Solz, which deals very explicitly with Solz and Dost, it turns out to be much closer than I thought — more like the Marlboro Cup race of 1976 in which Forego and Willie Shoemaker defeated Honest Pleasure by a nose. True, Solz never faced a firing squad, but Dost did not memorize a 120,000 word poem of his own composition while incarcerated in a labor camp. So read the works of both these titans and if there’s anything left of you at the end, you make the call.
Here’s a pic of Dost’s second wife Anna Grigorevna Snitkina. She’s no Padma Lakshmi but she’s not without a certain hotness, wouldn’t you agree? She put up with a lot! As the late Hunter Thompson put it, "You buy the ticket and you take the ride."
