I ought to write something about Solzhenitsyn. Though what is there to write, really? Everything’s obvious. But I can just feel that I have to. Judging by the fact that Yandex Blogs shows 1,620 posts on the subject, I’m not the only one. That too is a sign of greatness: he dies, and a thousand people think, I ought to write something about Solzhenitsyn. So then, Solzhenitsyn in my life: Back in the days when they had started mentioning him on TV, but his books were still impossible to get hold of (I was in sixth grade), I thought his surname was “Slozhenitsyn.” There was a Kazakh guy who went with me to the preparatory courses for applicants to Moscow State University (MSU). A Russian from Kazakhstan. I don’t remember why, but we got to talking about S., and he told me that people in Kazakhstan really dislike S. because he called for northern Kazakhstan to be annexed to Russia. For that, they gave him a very offensive nickname, from a Kazakh point of view: “Solzhenitsyn-Malzhenitsyn.” For some reason it stuck in my head, and for the past 15 years, wherever I hear or read “Solzhenitsyn,” I mentally add “Malzhenitsyn.” So this morning I went onto Newsru.com and read: “Solzhenitsyn-Malzhenitsyn Has Died.” When I was applying to MSU after those very same courses, he came up as an essay topic. There were three topics, and I chose to write on “The moral something-or-other in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The funniest thing is that I hadn’t actually read One Day at the time. It was the only book among those a person “applying to a respectable university” was supposed to have read that I hadn’t read. I still have no idea how that happened. But I didn’t like the other two topics at all, so I wrote my essay about Denisovich. Mostly I wrote about Matryona’s Home, then added some stuff about Solzhenitsyn himself, and inserted the words “Ivan Denisovich” wherever I could. For the essay I got a 5/3. Five for content, three for literacy. In the end I missed admission by one point and didn’t get into MSU. But I wasn’t mad at Solzhenitsyn. I just really love putting commas where they belong and where they don’t. And I’ve always had some trouble with single and double “n” in Russian spelling. Among the “true democrats and free-marketeers,” one was supposed not to like Solzhenitsyn. I mean, you couldn’t exactly say so openly—his заслуги were too obvious. What you were supposed to do (if someone suddenly started quoting S. and holding him up as an example) was arch an eyebrow ironically and bring up his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, where S. speaks out, among other things, against technological progress. Naturally, nobody had actually read the “letter to the leaders,” but everyone knew that such a thing existed and that it was against technological progress. I remember they showed these incredibly long interviews with him on TV (he was living in Vermont then). They asked him something about the newspaper MK (Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular Russian tabloid daily), which had been taking swipes at him. He answered. The next day, on MK’s front page, there was: *“Interviewer: ‘Doesn’t it offend you that all these Moscow Komsomol types... etc.’ Solzhenitsyn: ‘It doesn’t offend me... etc.’ In the faraway state of Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is thinking about the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.” *I remember thinking then: wow, they really got him good. And for some reason that too stayed with me forever. Oddly enough, it was the writer Vladimir Sorokin (the one who wrote Blue Lard) who opened Solzhenitsyn up for me. I love Sorokin and consider him a great writer. And in some interview, the great writer Sorokin was asked whom he considered a genius. He said something to the effect that the unquestionably genius Russian writer still alive was Solzhenitsyn, and that The Gulag Archipelago was genius beyond words. After that I started reading. And halfway through The First Circle, a kind of ordinary, unsensational thought really did occur to me: yes, a genius.