There was an old spinster living next door to my parents who was an ardent Bolshevik (Soviet, rather than Latin American style Communist). She was the sort described in P.J.O'Rourke's great article "Ship of Fools", although I don't know if she ever visited the USSR.
Anyway, at the time of Kruschev, Solzenitzen suddenly became flavour of the month in the USSR, and, like a good Communist following the party line this neighbour gave my mum a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
I don't know if mum ever read it, but I did, and I was so stunned I got all his other books, Cancer Ward, Gulag Archipelago, etc. He was an old style writer uninfected with "modernism" - with an easy lineage to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: One of the few great people to leak out of the massive reservoir of potential that was Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, after it was poisoned by Lenin's criminal gang.
I couldn't put down Gulag Archipelago --I was laughed at for bringing it as beach reading one summer, but I wasn't going to be away from it for a whole weekend.
I read the passage on Maxim Gorky's cowardice when he visited the Gulag aloud during a drama class in college; the class needed a little innoculation while we were reading The Lower Depths.
Plus my parents were fairly addicted to him. There was a time in late childhood when I never saw my dad without his newsman's big stack of papers and a work of Solzhenitsyn on top. Gulag, Cancer Ward, First Circle, The Oak & The Calf. Mom would snitch his copies and there'd be occasional humorous arguments over who'd stolen the book from whom.
I used to read lengthy books such as Gulag Archipelago, (War & Peace, etc), but not so much now. I'm with the Duke of Gloucester:
"Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?"
(The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)
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