The Russian anti-totalitarian writer and moral witness Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn looms large over the confused Western modern mind. At the same time, his work continues to challenge his beloved Russia, especially in its need to recognize the whole truth about communist iniquity. His writings profoundly impacted the world during the Cold War, conveying the deprivations of Soviet communism in a language of imaginative depth and moral strength. His novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), revealed the sordid realities of the Soviet camp system but also in Ivan Denisovich, a character whose humane and resilient spirit found a way to persevere. The book became an international literary event, embarrassing the Soviet government, which had allowed it to be published during a period of relative openness (Khrushchev had mistaken it for a merely anti-Stalinist book, rather than a profoundly anti-communist one).
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