An interesting thought from Time magazine, 1968

Their original review of Cancer Ward says this:
"Solzhenitsyn ... uncompromisingly asserts that modern man can arm himself against the fear of death only with life itself. He must do so by reducing life to complete simplicity, seeing it with unblinking honesty but loving and prizing it nevertheless. If Solzhenitsyn is against cruelty, hypocrisy and loss of freedom, he is also against the distracting things that freedom—with its consequent financial inequality—engenders. Snobbery, status seeking, self importance, the acquisition of consumer goods, materialism —everything, in short, that tends to repress the natural piety of men.
Like those of pure revolutionaries, saints and some hippies, Solzhenitsyn's views are not political, except where they concern (as they inevitably do) a hostile, worldly society. Like saints and pure revolutionaries, but unlike most hippies, Solzhenitsyn's heroes have spent a lifetime learning the absolute value of simplicity."

A good summation of Solzhenitsyn's philosophy, I think.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902542,00.html
From the Nov 8, 1968 issue, I don't see who the reviewer is.