Solzhenitsyn's Death

It is so odd. I was just in the book store thinking about buying a copy of the abridged Gulag Archipelago. We have the full three volume work at home in Chicago but of course I never got through it. I remember long ago trying to read it--I think I was still in college--and being struck by how many words I had to look up in the course of reading it. He used so many words that have only obscure English language equivalents. I remember the word "metastasis" and being so surprised that he had used a technical medical word that I thought no one would ever be expected to know. Of course once I knew it I heard it all the time. I don't know if that is because I started to be sensitive to it or because Solzhenitsyn's work itself made it more popular.

As I was reading today I was struck by how he always used metaphors to make his writing come alive. The metaphors would be drawn out for pages at a time. The archipelago metaphor is kept through the whole book and used over and over again to pull out new shades of meaning. Each phase of the purge is a new wave. Each group that gets targeted is a new river. A person caught in it is a single drop. One of the metaphors was only a paragraph. The purge was like an epidemic sweeping through a neighborhood. Like an epidemic it spread through casual contact, a hand shake or a chance meeting. If you were destined to 'confess' tomorrow and we had by chance exchanged words today, then I, too, am doomed.