Written between 1958 and 1968 but finally published only in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s “The Gulag Archipelago” told in horrifying detail the story of how Joseph Stalin’s lieutenants worked millions of Russians to death in the forced-labor camp system known as the Gulag. Originally set up under Vladimir Lenin, the Gulag persisted and grew under Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The book’s most damning revelation was that all this deadly brutality, far from being anomalous, had been a direct expression of communist philosophy. Communism was thereby unmasked, its credibility destroyed. Less than two decades after its publication, “The Gulag Archipelago” was credited with bringing down an empire.
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Lenox — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s middle son, the conductor and pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn, has quite a few stories to tell about his dad. He’ll tell some of them, play the piano and read some of his father’s poetry Friday, Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m. at Tanglewood’s Linde Center for Music and Learning. That should give you enough time to get your wits about you after feasting like a decadent proletariat (at the 6 p.m. reception) on vodka, blini, smoked salmon, eggs and sprats, salmon gravlax, vodka, herring rollmops, smoked trout, Olivier salad, beef and dill zakuski piroshki, vodka, lamb rack kebabs, wild mushroom canape, beef borscht, and vodka cocktails by Berkshire Mountain Distillers.
To preemptively assuage your guilt about pigging out at the reception, you can participate in Russian folk dancing from 4 to 5 p.m.
