{"id":393,"date":"2008-08-04T10:36:47","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T15:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=393"},"modified":"2008-08-04T10:36:47","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T15:36:47","slug":"solzhenitsyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=393","title":{"rendered":"Solzhenitsyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The author of The Gulag Archipelago has died.<\/a><\/p>\n

He spent seven years in the Gulag, for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. There he began to write, and he never stopped. For a long time, practically everything he wrote was illegal; he and his courageous friends had to hide his work and smuggle it out to the West.<\/p>\n

I remember reading vast amounts of The Gulag Archipelago while dismaying over the vast amounts I still had left to read. I never finished it, having only gotten through the first two volumes.<\/p>\n

And I remember being annoyed at the translator. Solzhenitsyn had used the ironic label of “investigators” when referring to the government thugs who would crush your testicles under their boots. The humorless and misguided translator thought that the thugs seemed more like “interrogators,” so he changed it to that throughout the book.<\/p>\n

[At least he did make a note of that change, so that readers could know that he’d done it. I do appreciate that. I just mentally switched the words back to their original form as I read.]<\/p>\n

Anyway, I hope that wherever Solzhenitsyn is now, he’s beating the crap out of Stalin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author of The Gulag Archipelago has died. He spent seven years in the Gulag, for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. There he began to write, and he never stopped. For a long time, practically everything he wrote was illegal; he and his courageous friends had to hide his work and smuggle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-famous-people","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}