The glass in the official picture was also being shattered by literary writers. Two Soviet accounts in particular captivated Western opinion. The poet Boris Pasternak wrote a novel, Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in Moscow but appeared abroad in translations from 1957. Its panoramic viewpoint on the civil war cast a shadow over the motives and practices of the early communists. This plunged Pasternak into political hot water and he had to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958. His role as a leading critic of the Soviet regime was picked up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose later works were published in the West from the end of the 1960s. His documentary account of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, was a bestseller in 1974. It pulled no punches. Solzhenitsyn had talked to survivors of the camps and assembled such documentation as was available despite the censorship. The gruesome techniques of arrest, interrogation, ‘confession’ and forced labour were traced from the October Revolution. When he was deported from the USSR in 1974, Solzhenitsyn continued his campaign against the iniquities of communist repression. Every year, too, novels and poems by other writers were smuggled out of eastern Europe and China with searing messages about the behaviour of communist regimes.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The glass in the official picture was also being shattered by literary writers. Two Soviet accounts in particular captivated Western opinion. The poet Boris Pasternak wrote a novel, Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in Moscow but appeared abroad in translations from 1957. Its panoramic viewpoint on the civil war cast a shadow over the motives and practices of the early communists. This plunged Pasternak into political hot water and he had to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958. His role as a leading critic of the Soviet regime was picked up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose later works were published in the West from the end of the 1960s. His documentary account of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, was a bestseller in 1974. It pulled no punches. Solzhenitsyn had talked to survivors of the camps and assembled such documentation as was available despite the censorship. The gruesome techniques of arrest, interrogation, ‘confession’ and forced labour were traced from the October Revolution. When he was deported from the USSR in 1974, Solzhenitsyn continued his campaign against the iniquities of communist repression. Every year, too, novels and poems by other writers were smuggled out of eastern Europe and China with searing messages about the behaviour of communist regimes." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.