SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR. (1918-2008). Soviet dissident and author best known for The Gulag Archipelago; winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. TLS. (“ASolzen” in Cyrillic “Солжень”). ½p. 4to. Cavendish, November 26, 1991. Typed on his personal stationery to US Senator from New York, DANIEL PATRICK “PAT” MOYNIHAN (1927-2003).

“I have read your article with gratitude.

Your understanding of my thoughts, with which I am not spoiled in the United States, rejoices me: they write reviews about me usually not even having read my text, but from some second-hand, distorted references.

I remember well our meeting in Vermont – even earlier, your presence at my speech in Washington in 1975, when the White House and the State Department recommended not attending it...”

Born into a family of religious dissidents, Solzhenitsyn briefly embraced Marxism-Leninism before his private criticisms of Stalin landed him in “internal exile” in a Siberian gulag. There he renewed his Eastern Orthodox faith and following the death of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s slight thaw against censorship, he published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) set in a Soviet labor camp, followed by additional works of fiction. However, after Khrushchev’s 1964 removal from power, the state returned to its more repressive past and confiscated early drafts of The Gulag Archipelago, which detailed the Russian labor camp system. Despite state intervention, Solzhenitsyn completed the work in 1968 while in hiding, and smuggled sections out of Russia to be published in Paris in 1973. Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and deported to West Germany. In 1976, he settled in the United States and continued to write, publishing Rebuilding Russia in 1990. He returned to Russia in 1994 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and was an early supporter of Putin. Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the White House to visit President Ford was initially declined due to the National Security Council and Secretary of State Kissinger’s concerns that the meeting could harm the US’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

In a November 13, 1974 journal entry, Moynihan recorded that he brought Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago on his vacation at a seaside resort in Kovalam, India, and in September 1978, he wrote a letter to Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Natalia, praising the work. After a 1979 article in Newsweek in which Moynihan predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union in the coming decade, Solzhenitsyn invited Moynihan and his wife, architectural historian Elizabeth Moynihan (1930-2023), to his home in Vermont, which Moynihan recounted in his article “Two Cheers for Solzhenitsyn” published in the November 24, 1991 issue of The New York Times, the article referred to in our letter.

Folded with light creasing; in excellent condition. Solzhenitsyn letters with content are scarce.