Why this blog

Yes, yes, the Internet is saturated enough with the ramblings of Solzhenitsyn fans, what with the endless discussions on Into the Sharashka about what really kept Rubin awake at night, or whatever happened to Shulubin, or the flame wars over at CanWard.net about the new movie, whether Britney Spears or Scarlett Johanssen would be best for Zoya, and what on earth the director was thinking about cutting out Shulubin's speech about ethical socialism.

Don't I wish :(

I have two favorite writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and C.S. Lewis. When I began to discover the Internet in 1999 (yes I was slow, but I was living in Niger, Africa for most of the 90s), I wanted to find out what was available about my two favorite writers. To my delight, there was oodles of stuff about Lewis, and to this day I hang out at "Into the Wardrobe". But on Solzhenitsyn? Barely anything, other than a few short bios. I have recently found a Yahoo group on Solzhenitsyn, but there isn't a lot of activity in it. Although when they post, there are some very knowlegeable folks there.

I just did a Google blog search and turned up 1) a Soviet patriot who thinks Solzhenitsyn slandered the USSR, 2) an anti-Semitic site which thinks "Two Hundred Years Together" is anti-Semitic and commends it for being so, but on the good side, one literary blog who tells a great story about reading Cancer Ward and another about getting his mother to buy him Gulag Archipelago when he was ten (and he still hasn't finished it 30 years later).

I even tried a Google search on "Solzhenitsyn forum" in Russian (I don't speak it, I used Google's translating service) and I found a couple of forum posts about a recent Solzhenitsyn interview, but they weren't forums that discusses Solzhenitsyn's books.

So I was inspired to try to start this blog to create at least a small bit of the ambiance that could happen if there were as many Solzhenitsyn fans on the Internet as there were Lewis fans. But this blog will not be limited to Solzhenitsyn pure and simple, after all one of the principles of Mavrino sharashka culture (and of Butyrki cell 53) is be interested in everything, and lets take the time to talk about it.

Will anyone ever read this? I don't know, I have no illusions. But at least it won't vanish in smoke over the Lubyanka.