This weekend's passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn prompted me to think about my senior year in college. I was a history major with a concentration in Russian History (and had no clue what a hash table was by the time I graduated). My senior thesis was a comparison of the experiences of political prisoners under the Tsarist regime of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, to those of the political prisoners of the Stalinist era. The irony is that it was the political prisoners of the first that led the revolution which over time, resulted (indirectly) in Stalin coming to power. And Stalin cast a much broader net when defining his enemies.
My research mostly took the form of reading published diaries. Many of them. Solzhenitsyn's writings about the labor camps was definitely an invaluable resource.
So if you can imagine my days and nights for months and months spent in a dark corner of the library reading these harrowing personal accounts.
In addition to my other classes, that semester I was the photo editor for the college yearbook. When I wasn't in classes and wasn't reading the depressing diaries, I spent endless hours in a darkroom processing film and printing photos. The only radio station that I could receive in the darkroom (remember this was the early 80's so our media options were pretty limited) was one that played golden oldies from the 1940's. This was apropos since the this is the time of the Stalinist labor camps.
So all in all it was a very dark 4 months in my life, not only literally dark, but filled with doom, gloom and hopelessness and living in the past.
What I never knew until his death yesterday, was that he, too lived in Vermont. From 1976 to 1990 when he returned to his homeland, he lived in the tiny town of Cavendish in Southern Vermont.
