Pravi početak Ivana Denisoviča
ALEXANDER WAT ON SOLZENICIN, STALINISM AND HIMSELF

Summary/Abstract: Alexander Wat is the author of a fascinating book: My Age. It is the author's autobiography and at the same time the history of communism. The material that was not included in My Age was used for a book of essays under the title The World an the Hook and under the Key, which is a supplement for My Age. In both books he describes the age of rise and growth of communism, especially Stalinism as one of its phases, which he himself experienced in the USSR during the war and in Poland after the war until 1957, when he moved to Italy due to bad health, and then to France. He died in 1967 because his body was weakened due to tortures he had undergone in the USSR prisons during the war. He was a prisoner of 11 different prisons in only six years, one of which was Lubianka. He experienced the same kind of inferno in Poland in the late forties, when endeavours were made to include him in the government mechanism as one of the few communists that survived A serious illness, cerebral haemorrhage, prevented him from writing a study on communism with emphasis on Stalinism. Thanks to Cezslaw Milosz, My Age or Discussions with Czeslaw Milosz was writen. In it, he described his life, his communist oriented intelectual and artistic environment.

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