Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

My meeting with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at his home in Moscow in 1998 ranks as perhaps the greatest honor of my life. At the time, the great Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner was approaching his eightieth birthday. My biography, therefore, was a timely tribute to a life well-lived, a life of courage in the face of tyranny, a life of true heroism. It was, however, a life that was still being lived, a life that still had a good deal of life in it. Solzhenitsyn would live for a further ten years, a full decade, in which he resolutely refused to retire and in which he remained a controversial figure in Russia, and indeed throughout the world.

Since Solzhenitsyn’s life was far from finished when I wrote about it, my “life” of him was also, ipso facto, an unfinished work. This second edition is, therefore, the final version of a biography of which the first edition was only a precursor. Containing four additional chapters and some important revisions, the present volume offers a panoramic perspective of the whole of Solzhenitsyn’s life, all eighty-nine years of it, and a testimony and tribute to his achievement and his legacy.