Once they were literary comrades, united in mutual admiration and political dissent. But now one has used his new book to deliver a scathing attack on the other. This week, Russian Nobel prize winner, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, became the subject of a bitter personal attack from a former friend and admirer, fellow countryman and author Vladimir Voinovich.
In a new book, sardonically titled Portrait in a Myth's Setting, Voinovich, once an anti-Soviet activist, attacks the cult of personality that has sprung up around literary giant Solzhenitsyn.
The Nobel prize winner first chronicled the terror of Stalin's gulag, was expelled from the Soviet Union for his work, and provided a relentless and vital criticism of Russia's reforming politicians in the nineties.
Voinovich, 69, who is best known for his book, The Life and Amazing Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin, is unrelentingly personal in his attack on Solzhenitsyn, who will soon be 84, and is infirm.
"He accepts without criticism the qualities and deeds which are attributed to him by public opinion," Voinovich snipes. "And he has accepted the idea that... it is God who moves his hand when he writes."
He continues: "His very variable approach to human rights and other human preoccupations can only be explained by one thing - clear egoism. As a writer he wasn't bad, even excellent at times but notions about his greatness, his genius, his prophetical abilities and moral purity are part of a myth." Voinovich goes on to say that he tried to read one of Solzhenitsyn's novels published in the eighties, "but it was unreadable. It was very dull, with a very heavy text, with a language too ornate and sometimes inarticulate".
Exiled
Both writers were exiled for their work by the Soviet regime, and Voinovich writes how he admired Solzhenitsyn for 13 years when he first read his work. Yet the relationship turned sour, and much of the book is given to his recollection of difficult meetings with Solzhenitsyn. He attacks the writer's vanity when he recalls that, at the height of Solzhenitsyn's fame just before he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, he saw him in new western clothes and a recently grown beard without a moustache. "As I thought later he was trying to adapt his face to western TV screens," he writes. "He later asked women what they felt about this, and they answered that he had a very masculine image."
Voinovich told him then that the new appearance did not suit him and that he resembled a beatnik. "He did not respond but his eyes shone with anger, and I thought he would never forget this phrase."
Solzhenitsyn was persecuted by the state for his writings, which increased his international reputation. Voinovich adds: "An unprecedented noise about his name dragged the attention away from [the persecution of] other not so well-known names. I think that the KGB [benefited from this distraction]."
Voinovich's bitter resentment becomes evident when he refers to a time when Solzhenitsyn asked a friend to advise Voinovich not to seek money from his writing. Voinovich was affronted by the advice. "Being a lout, he does not speak the same way with everybody. Why is he so rude with me? Maybe I have given him a pretext to think he can speak in such a way."
Solzhenitsyn, born to a Cossack family in 1918, served in the war but was thrown into jail in 1945 when the KGB intercepted a letter to a friend in which he criticised Stalin. He served time in labour camps, but was discharged in 1953, and sent into internal exile in the remote town of Berlik. He began to write about his experiences and in 1961 tried to publish his debut manuscript, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, an exposure of Stalin's gulag. Under Khruschev's relaxation of censorship, it was published in 1962.
Khruschev was ousted soon after, taking with him the new cultural freedoms. Yet Solzhenitsyn kept writing, sending Cancer Ward - another autobiographical account, of his cancer while in jail - to a New York publisher in 1968. His anti-Soviet stance only increased his stature in the west, and when he published an explicit account of forced labour in Stalin's camps in The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, he was expelled from the USSR.
Critical
Moving to the US he continued to write abroad, and had his Soviet citizenship restored to him in 1990 by Gorbachev. He returned to Moscow in 1994 to a mixed reception. He was fiercely critical of Yeltsin and his opposing politicians.
Some consider Voinovich's book to be more about the writer's opinion of his stature in the world, than a dissection of Solzhenitsyn's. The book also finds time to be critical of another famous Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov.
Voinovich held a press conference in Moscow to launch his attack on Thursday. "Any cult of personality is dangerous and the cult of Solzhenitsyn was taking very dangerous shape," he told the Guardian in an interview yesterday. "I see Solzhenitsyn as not a completely honest narrator and commentator of his own destiny and life. His dishonesty consists of believing in the image that both he and the public invented of him. Solzhenitsyn is a rude man. He doesn't support any criticism and affirms in his works that he knows the answer. And people who think they know that answer, when they get power, are extremely dangerous."
The Solzhenitsyn Foundation in Moscow said that their - and Solzhenitsyn's - official position was not to comment, but the spokeswoman added: "If you read the book, everything will become clear."
Solzhenitsyn is thought to be in poor health. In an interview this week with a Swedish journalist he was unable to get out of his chair to shake the interviewer's hand, and it was noted that his physical appearance had deteriorated in the last year. He said: "I am tired now, and on my way to leaving life."
Writers who fought Soviet state
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Born: December 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia
Educated: University of Rostov, correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University
Born into family of Cossack intellectuals, his father died in a hunting accident six months before his birth. Twice decorated during second world war, he was arrested in 1945 for criticising Stalin in a letter and sent to prison. He was released from labour camp in 1953. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published in 1963.
He twice married and twice divorced Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaia. They had three sons. In 1973 he married Dmitrievna Svetlova. The Soviet government denounced his 1970 Nobel prize as a politically hostile act. He was exiled in 1974, and lived in Switzerland and then the US. He returned to Russia in 1994.The Solzhenitsyn prize for Russian writing was established in 1997.
Vladimir Voinovich Born September 1932, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Educated Moscow
In the 60s he debuted with the novels We Live Here and I Want To Be Honest. His most famous work is The Life And Amazing Adventures Of Soldier Ivan Chonkin. His writing led him to be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1974 for its political attacks on the regime. He was subsequently invited to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1980. A year later, his Soviet citizenship was removed by Leonid Brezhnev. He accepted the Bavarian offer and moved to Germany until his citizenship was restored in 1990 and he returned to Moscow. Today he commutes regularly to Germany and is married with a daughter.