Features September 2018
A sketch of democracy
An excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir Between Two Millstones.
For two months already there had been an invitation waiting for me from the Canton of Appenzell to attend the ceremony of their cantonal elections, and the editor-in-chief of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Fred Luchsinger, had urged that this was something I absolutely must not miss, and now he drove [my wife] Alya and me there.1 My departure for Canada was planned for Monday, and the elections being on Sunday, I could still make the ceremony. Appenzell is a small mountain canton in eastern Switzerland; in fact, there are two Appenzells—two half-cantons—a Catholic and a Protestant one, that had separated from one another. We had been invited to the Catholic one. On the way there, as we passed...
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