Aleksandr Solyzhenisyn Was My Father

Actually, no. My father was (is) Dave Shipley, retired Capital High School history teacher. For Ignat Solyzhenisyn, he has had quite a different life from me - he was the son of one of Russia's most famous writers.

From the piece in the Telegraph...

Polite but formal in his e-mail correspondence, I had expected Ignat to be an intimidating figure. This is the son of a man who survived the Second World War, the gulag, exile, stomach cancer and persecution by the KGB; who hastened the collapse of the USSR with his politically explosive books; and who alienated liberal Western opinion with his infamous Harvard address of 1978 in which he attacked “decadent” Western culture. If even a fraction of this ferociously defiant, contrarian attitude had rubbed off on his son, then I was in for a difficult interview. And yet Ignat, 37, a big, burly man, was open, warm, and gregarious and entirely lacking in pretension or pomposity. Did he or his two brothers ever find their father overwhelming?

“No. You hear about quirks and deviations with artists, but we were very fortunate. I can’t imagine a great man being more normal than he was.”