Strongly disagree. Reading for the first time in Russian and finding that it flows wonderfully. Solzhenitsyn has a unique tone of voice: at once conversational, ironic, sadly humorous, and full of pathos. His imagery can be breathtaking, e.g. when he's talking about the different rivers of prisoners flowing in and out of the gulag system. When referencing his own life, his sense of narrative pacing is superb. And when it comes to matters of the soul, he has a way with words that few others can touch. Indeed, there's a number of what I would consider "best of all time" quotes in the first few chapters alone.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate
them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to
destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it
is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow
enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at
various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.
At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name
doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
(I wrote down: "names are leaky abstractions.")
It's true that there's some dry and boring material, but I can hardly blame the author for that: he's the last living source for so many of these stories. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, trying in vain to resurrect the final, fading memories of the countless missing people who touched his life—nameless and nearly faceless, probably buried in some unmarked grave—while waiting for the KGB to burst in any minute and destroy his decade of work. How much more painful must the process of editing be when the things you cut are fragments of human lives that might as well have never existed once they leave the page?
Unfortunately, there's now a contingent of the Russian population that denounces Solzhenitsyn for reasons of pure nationalism. It makes me so sad when I see Solzhenitsyn mentioned in the Runet, because it's almost always extremely vitriolic...