A decade after death, Solzhenitsyn draws a blank with young Russians

A decade after the hugely influential author's death, some young Russians admit to only a passing knowledge of Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won a Nobel Prize for chronicling the horrors of the Soviet Gulag.

"Solzhenitsyn was a dissident, someone who opposed the Soviet regime and he was a great writer," summed up Alexander Polyakovsky, 23, who is studying international relations.

He admits he has not read any of the author's books.

"They talked about him a bit when I was at high school, during the Russian literature lessons, but I don't remember too much," he added.

Rather than hearing about Solzhenitsyn from teachers, "it was my mother who explained to me that he was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century," Polyakovsky said.

By contrast, his mother Yelena emotionally described how she discovered one of Solzhenitsyn's works hidden among the family's books during the Soviet era.

"I was a teenager and my parents drilled it into me that I mustn't tell anyone we had the book at home. It was a forbidden fruit," she said.

"It was such a different era that it's hard for my son to imagine it," she added, explaining his lack of interest.

Solzhenitsyn, who died on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89, shot to fame in the USSR with his 1962 novella that was the first in Soviet literature to describe everyday life in a prison camp, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
Alexander Altunyan, who teaches journalism at Moscow's International University, also notes the younger generation has little interest in Solzhenitsyn's weighty historic tomes and grimly realist novels such as "Cancer Ward."
"Out a class of 30 students, no more than two or three will have read a book by Solzhenitsyn. Most of them don't know a thing about him."