I have just reread the poem, in both languages. It is an astonishing and wrongly neglected work – a “war” poem of unparalleled power.

How should one judge Solzhenitsyn – one of the most striking public figures of our time? In his public capacity, he felt bound to step forward as the conscience of his people, saying: “My views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against it.” Yet above all, he saw himself as a writer – a Russian writer. For most of us, Russian literature is like a triangle around Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Chekhov – with Tolstoy standing apart in his own class. Solzhenitsyn, on the strength of August 1914 alone, competes in the Tolstoy lane. I rank him with his fellow Nobelists from eastern Europe, Boris Pasternak and Czeslaw Milosz – all three are both writers and moralists.

Solzhenitsyn first came to attention in the Soviet Union, and around the world, with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is a short work, avoiding anything akin to sensationalism. The circumstances of its publication are relevant both to its contents and, even more, to the political circumstances. Like much else in history, it was a matter of luck – the editor of the cultural journal Novy Mir had bypassed the censors and given the manuscript directly to Krushchev, who then thoughtlessly authorised publication.

His luck was not to hold. The printing was stopped almost immediately and both his plays and the novel, The First Circle, were seized in 1965, together with most of his papers. He later wrote: “During these months it seemed to me that I had committed an unpardonable mistake by revealing my work prematurely and that because of this I should not be able to carry it to a conclusion.”

Ivan Denisovich was followed by the kind of public drama which attended his whole career as a writer – especially his masterpieces, The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle. The day after his arrest, as he was being deported, a confidential order went out to all libraries to burn the few remaining editions of his works and to destroy completely all copies of Novy Mir that contained his stories. But as Galina Vishnevskaya (the wife of Mstislav Rostropovich, in whose dacha Solzhenitsyn lived from 1968 while writing much of The Gulag Archipelago) was to put it in her autobiography: “The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle and, however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in.”