11 December: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on this date in 1918. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His mother's name was Taisiya Zakharovna. Her family had a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. She met Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn when she was studying in Moscow. He was a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army.
2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never knew his father. He was killed in a hunting accident shortly after his mother became pregnant with him. He was raised by his mother and an aunt as the family estate was taken over and turned into a collective farm. Taisiya had to keep quiet about her late husband being in the Imperial Army. The family were poor now, but his mother, having been well educated, made sure her son was educated too.
3. He was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith, but as an adult became an atheist and supporter of the Marxist regime, serving in the Red Army during the second world war. His was an active service, seeing conflict at the front, leading to him being awarded the Order of the Red Star.
4. His disenchantment with the regime started about this time, as he witnessed the way his compatriots treated civilians. He would later write a long poem called Prussian Nights, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be German. By 1945 he was in prison in Moscow for “counter-revolutionary activities”, having written to a friend criticising Stalin.
5. In July of 1945 he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan, where he remained until 1953. During that time he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman and also helped with scientific research. He also spent time writing. His experiences inspired a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was the only one of his books which was published in the Soviet Union, since Nikita Khrushchev mistook Solzhenitsyn for a Soviet loyalist. The book won the Lenin Prize and gained Solzhenitsyn a worldwide audience.
6. While in the camp, Solzhenitsyn had a tumour removed. It was cancer, but wasn't diagnosed at the time. When his sentence ended, he was sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan. His cancer spread, and he ended up in hospital in Tashkent with a poor prognosis. The cancer went into remission though, and he recovered to live to the age of 89 when he died of heart failure. His experiences in the hospital became the basis for the book Cancer Ward. Around this time, he returned to the Eastern Orthodox faith.
7. The KGB gave Solzhenitsyn the code name Pauk, which means "Spider" in Russian. In 1971, they tried to assassinate him with an unknown chemical agent (probably ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. It made him very ill, but he survived.
8. He married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya in 1940. They were together for about a year before Aleksandr joined the army and subsequently went to prison. While he was in prison, they divorced, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After his release, they remarried and this time were together for 15 years before divorcing again in 1972. Natalia would claim in her memoirs that Aleksandr had affairs and stifled her independence. In 1973 he married Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician.
9. After imprisonment Solzhenitsyn lived in exile in the west, first in West Germany, then Switzerland and later in the USA. He was almost as critical of the way things were in the west as he'd been of Soviet Russia, slamming pop music and television as intolerable and spiritually empty.
10. His masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, for which he won the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, took 20 years to write, mostly in secret. It is a three volume work and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It made the world aware of the Gulag system and in time became required reading for Russian students.

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Themes 

Christmas; superheroes; reunions; parties; life choices; shocking surprises; mistaken identity; kidnap and rescue.

Reasons not to read it

• It's a bit short. You could probably read it in one sitting.
• Most of the action takes place at a Christmas party. In a palace.
• It's all about Christmas but there doesn't seem to be a schmaltzy moral message.
• There are a couple of babies and some small children in it - and one nearly gets eaten.
• Santa appears in it, but he isn't really Santa.
• Superheroes. Again.
• Not to mention a whole bunch of super-villains. Again all new ones and not the ones we know from Marvel or DC.

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle