2024-01-13 15:41:02
Published on January 13, 2024 at 4:41 p.m. / Modified on January 13, 2024 at 4:41 p.m.
John le Carré might have written this unbreathable preamble. At the end of summer 1973, the KGB crows were pounding on Elizabeth Voronianskaïa’s door. In her apartment in Leningrad, she takes a look at the hiding place where she hid the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago. This dedicated person is part of the brigade of shadows who type the 1600 pages which tear away the opacity of Soviet hell, where men and women harden or die, without name, without hope, forced to bring down the work in temperatures of -30 sometimes.
The search is chilling, as is the interrogation that follows. The KGB agents finally got their hands on these pages which made Leonid Brezhnev and his friends in the Kremlin tremble. The keyboard angel will commit suicide. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 45 years old at the time and already a Nobel Prize winner for literature, was informed of the catastrophe. In the countryside where he lives, he alerts friends. There’s not a day left to lose. The YMCA-Press house in Paris has a copy of the manuscript. At the end of December, she released the book in Russian. Then Editions du Seuil published in French a first volume with a print run of 700,000 (!) copies.
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#Georges #Nivat #heart #hell #Alexander #Solzhenitsyn #elevation
