This book is about the personality and work of the recently deceased writer, publicist, public figure Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man of tragic fate who went through war, eight years of camps, exile and return to his homeland. A brilliant critic and literary critic Vladimir Lakshin ( 1933–1993) was a direct witness to the battles that unfolded around the first publication of the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, the main blow in which was taken by the editor-in-chief of “New World”, poet Alexander Tvardovsky. Famous articles “Ivan Denisovich, his friends and foes”, a polemical response to the book “A calf butted an oak tree” - “Solzhenitsyn , Tvardovsky and “New World”, as well as the most interesting diaries of the author of this book from the “pre-perestroika” time will arouse undoubted interest among contemporaries - readers of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “In the First Circle”, “Cancer Ward” and “Two Hundred Years Together”, who are trying to figure it out in the cataclysms of our history. Letters from V.Ya. are published here for the first time. Lakshina to A.I. Solzhenitsyn, many pages of his diaries.