Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
In February 1945, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the Russian prison camps. Passages in letters to a friend had been found by military censors to be insufficiently respectful of Stalin.
After his “rehabilitation,” in 1959 he wrote perhaps his best-known and most well-loved story: “Matryona’s House.”
It begins like this:
“For at least six months after the incident took place every train used to slow down almost to a standstill at exactly a hundred and eighty-four kilometres from Moscow. The passengers would crowd to the windows and go out onto the open gangway at the end of the carriages to find out whether the track was under repair or if the train was ahead of schedule. But these were not the reasons for the delay.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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