ABSTRACT
Shortly before publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich catapulted him into the international limelight, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was introduced to Anna Akhmatova. She is said to have asked this unknown young writer whether he realized he would be the most famous man on earth within a month. After their meeting, Akhmatova described Solzhenitsyn to Chukovskaya as a bearer of light. Solzhenitsyn's life and writing offer unrivalled insight into the interaction of history and literature. With Solzhenitsyn recent history runs without stutter into current events, even into the immediate future. Solzhenitsyn belonged to the new technological class fostered by Stalin and thousands of institutes of learning in the 1930s. Solzhenitsyn himself had totally shared the life and conditions of other zeks in the camps. He was not a metropolitan intellectual; he lived under Shukhov's skin; he knew how to re-lay a mud floor every week after it turned to dust.
