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Blasphemy: the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Out to be a reactionary bigot? Hey, you should, like, seriously read this book. It’s by this guy who, like, totally lived in a Gulag for loads of years and stuff, it really reminds you of, like, how fortunate we are here in our cushy western culture where everything is cuddles and blowjobs, know what I mean? Hey, do you want to go and get, like, mega lashed at Thirst Lodge later? Ethan’s bringing a wrap he bought off that Slovak in Bonn Square.

If somebody says this to you, by all means go out and have fun, but for God’s sake ignore the literary suggestion; they’re most likely suggesting a novel by an author who, when he finally made it to the west, was probably disappointed by how moderate the Holocaust turned out to be. He’s dead now, so I’m pretty sure I can get away with saying that without a lawsuit in my pigeonhole. I doubt anybody is even reading this anyway, you’re all probably too busy tagging photos of yourself vomiting in tramps’ sleeping bags and drawing knobs on babies’ armpits.

And that’s the wonderful irony of this book. While stuck behind the Iron Curtain, Solzhenitsyn was hailed as a literary freedom fighter, the shocking voice of dissent amidst the stifling totalitarianism of the Soviet Union; he was even given a Nobel Prize for his inexhaustible ‘love of humanity’, and yet when he finally emerged an exile in 1974, everybody suddenly found out that he was, shock horror, a nationalist bigot who thought modern music was too loud and young people too soft. He’s basically Alf Garnett from Till Death Do Us Part, but without any self-restraint.

Frankly, he deserved to be in the Gulag, and if you don’t agree me, you deserve to be in there with him.
But back to the book. The unremitting dreariness of the Gulag is, of course, affecting, and at times you cannot help but feel deeply moved by the sheer comic horror of prison life. However, one still gets the sense that the real message behind this novel is not that the Gulag is the problem, just that the wrong people are in it.

 

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