How to write books in a prison camp
Aug 4, 2008 Ars Longa, Faith and Works, Heart and spirit, Oppression, Past is prologue, Sisyphus
The Zek
How Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose death I noted yesterday, did it — in the New York Times obituary:
At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.
That’s all there is to it, I guess.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Sorry, you Western secularists missed the boat on this one. Aleksandr Isaevich tackled the issue of good and evil, and you are disappointed that he did not say how “good” you are.
He was simply the greatest man of the New Dark Age of the 20th century. Who do liberals put up as an alternative? That media fraud, Mohandas Gandhi?
You may believe in Western secularism or the revival of Orthodoxy in Russia. BTW you shan’t read about it in the NYT or the IHT, the ideology of the reporters blinds them. What say you to that?
August 5th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I was struck by how, when he returned to Russia in 1994, he took the train from Vladivostok to Moscow.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:26 am
01varvara, did you actually read my blog post? Talk about “missing” the point.
YM, do you suppose he wanted to “take in” the experience more intensely?