![]() But it’s onwards and upwards from here.Ħ.10am: It is breakfast time. I spot the moon through my curtains, decide that battling authoritarianism can wait a few more hours, roll over and go back to sleep.Ħam: Fell at the first hurdle. ![]() When he was writing his monumental attack on the Soviet regime, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn would rise at 1am, work until 9am, grudgingly take a short break, then pick back up again until 6pm. I’ll never complain about Friday-night deadlines again.ġam: Wake up. To mark 11 December’s 100th anniversary of his birth, I decided to spend 24 hours in the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But – dare I ask – do the harrowing details of his biography, and the weightiness of the tomes that he wrote, cause us to take Solzhenitsyn a little too seriously? Blinded by the big bushy beard and loose peasant’s smock that gave him the aura of an Old Testament figure, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s lifelong ascetic tendencies, stretching long before and after his imprisonment, are almost as endearingly eccentric as they are admirable. ![]()
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