Our
writing relies on our perceptions, leading us down a bright or dark
path if that’s how we see the world but and are infinite in variety. For
instance in Dostoyevsky’s case appreciating and writing about appalling
privation because he himself experienced it as a starving writer and
Solzhenitsyn also as a state prisoner. Who can fail to be moved by the
young man’s utter destitution in Crime And Punishment, or the Gulag
convict fussing over...