When Solzhenitsyn visited the Hoover Institution at Stanford
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A lovely recounting by Bertrand Patenaude, in the Summer issue of Hoover Digest, of Solzhenitsyn’s time spent in the Hoover archives in 1975 and 1976. Solzhenitsyn himself considered the Hoover collections hugely valuable, both for Russian history in general, and for his own specific research into the Revolution.
“For forty years I had been preparing to write about the Revolution in Russia—1976 being forty years from my initial conception of the book—but it was only now at the Hoover Institution that I encountered such an unexpected volume and scope of material that I could leaf through and drink in. It was only now that I truly came to see it all, and seeing it caused a shift in my mind I did not expect. . . . Encountering the materials from the Hoover Institution, I was overwhelmed by these tangible fragments of history from the days of the February Revolution and the period leading up to it. . . . Without this towering, growing heap of living material from those years, how could I have ever imagined that it went like this?”