Solzhenitsyn's 18 years of misunderstanding with the US

0 Comments | AFP, August, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn may have come to hate the Stalinist Soviet Union, but the capitalist United States did not win his heart either.

Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday aged 89, spent 18 years living in a remote village in the Vermont forests of the northern United States. He returned home in May 1994 after an exile marked by mutual misunderstanding.

Uneasy relations quickly emerged between the Americans, proud of a democracy they consider to be an example to the whole world, and the author of "The Gulag Archipeligo".

The conflict blew up on June 8, 1978, two years after Solzhenitsyn left Switzerland to set up in Cavendish, a village of 1,300 people, which Solzhenitsyn described as a little piece of Russia.

On that day, addressing...