I have never read much Solzhenitsyn. Not The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For that matter I've never read Shalamov or Ginsburg. I had recently written about how I also haven't repeatedly plumbed the depths of the Holocaust. It's not that I try by any means to deny history's worst atrocities. I have read the numbers and high level accounts of the absolute worst moments of the 20th century, I just haven't chosen to dive down into all of the details.
Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recently had an article in the Times Literary Supplement which argued that all of Russian Literature is shot through with the destructive imperialism that led to the invasion of Ukraine. It's tough to swallow, but not hard to understand given the perspective of the writer right about now. It's not unlike a low-income Black person whose path forward in life has been blocked time and again by a world seemingly constructed to engineer her failure and death having a hard time with almost the entirety of white culture, from Bing Crosby to Mia Hamm. After a while you can imagine how it all might sting.
Certainly my own perspective on Russia is limited by my having filtered out the worst of it. I guess I should probably work on that a little.
Along parallel lines, I have stopped in the middle of the bio of Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig that I wrote about a month ago. The faults of the book have conspired to halt me in my consumption of its story, which is basically about how this guy kept going no matter what. Maybe I should try to push through there.
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