Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, earth two and a single one air. Five of the ten were retrograde at birth, which is half the chart facing backwards, and one of them is Mercury. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in the camps and wrote The Gulag Archipelago from testimony gathered in secret, and that he was stripped of citizenship and deported in 1974 and returned twenty years later.

One planet in air, in a writer whose entire method was collecting what other people said, is the count to start from and it is an inverse. Air is the element of what gets spoken, compared and circulated, and this chart has almost none of it. Mercury, which a reader will be told is the planet of speech, was running backwards, in a man who gathered testimony in secret and had it published in another country. That is a coincidence of vocabulary worth one sentence and no more, because a retrograde Mercury is in the sky about a fifth of the time.

The chart itself is loose, and for a record this size the gap has to be stated. The closest contact is Venus in quiet contact with Mars at under a quarter of a degree, desire that moves easily: warmth, creative energy and an uncomplicated relationship with wanting things, which is about as far from eight years in a camp as a reading can get. Jupiter sits in mild friction with Saturn at under a third, expansion against caution: the swing between taking too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. For a man deported in one decade and returned in another, timing imposed by a state is not what that reading describes.

The Moon sits square Venus at under a degree, what soothes a person and what attracts them disagreeing, and sixty degrees from Mars at a degree and a quarter, feelings translating into action cleanly, with its sign certain at twenty two degrees of Pisces. Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the five retrograde planets. He died at Moscow on 3 August 2008, at eighty nine, in the city he had been expelled from. One contact came inside half a degree that day, the Moon sixty degrees from his natal Pluto at under four tenths, which puts one of the quietest skies in this set against one of the loudest records. The Moon was new and five per cent lit.