 Александр Исаевич Солженицын / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist,dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. In 1994, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.
While in the Soviet Union
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, the son of a young widowed mother, Taisia Solzhenitsyna (nee Scherbak), whose father had risen, it seems, from humble beginnings, much of a self-made man, and acquired a large estate in the Kuban region by the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, the daughter had gone to study in Moscow, where she met Isaaky Solzhenitsyn, a young army officer, also from the Caucasus region (the family background of his parents is vividly brought alive in the opening chapters of August 1914, and later on in the Red Wheel novel cycle). In 1918, his young wife became pregnant, but soon after this was confirmed, Isaaky was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his mother and aunt in lowly circumstances; his earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War and the family property was, of course, turned into a kolkhoz by 1930. Solzhenitsyn has stated that his mother was fighting for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His mother encouraged his literary and scientific leanings; she died shortly before 1940.
Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (at this time heavily ideological in scope; as he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union before he had spent some time in the camps). During World War II, he served as the commander of an artillery position finding company in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia he was arrested for criticising Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka, special scientific research facilities run by Ministry of State Security: these formed the experiences distilled in The First Circle, published in the West in 1968. In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundryman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not then diagnosed.
From March 1953, Solzhenitsyn began a sentence of internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread, until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was cured. These experiences became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story The right hand. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has some interesting parallel streaks to Dostoevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn's gradual turn to a philosophically-minded Christianity is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago. ("The Soul and Barbed Wire.")
During his years of exile, and following his reprieve and return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. He later wrote, in the short autobiography composed at the time of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."
Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached a poet and the chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine Alexander Tvardovsky with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev—Tvardovsky instantly knew that this was needed for a work of this kind—and would remain his only book-length work to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West. It caused as much a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the twenties on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, even by a man who had been to Siberia for "libellous speech" about the leaders, and still it had not been censored. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard-of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most Soviet readers realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came quietly, but perceptibly, to a close. Solzhenitsyn did not give in but tried, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of writers, and though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied publication if it were not revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-soviet insinuations (these turnings are recounted and documented in The Oak and the Calf).
The printing of his work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the monumental Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretences and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something that had come close to second-nature, but which was getting increasingly irrelevant (the circumstances of how he actually survived in this period, without any income from his books, are obscure; he had quit his teaching post when he broke through as a writer).
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid that he would not be let back into his beloved mother-country once he had left it. Instead, it was suggested that he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow instead. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution, since such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relations to the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was a three volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It discussed the system's origins from Lenin and the very founding of the Communist regime, detailing everything from interrogation procedures and prisoner transports, to camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile . The appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities.
In the West
Solzhenitsyn became something of a cause celebre in the West, earning him the enmity of Soviet regime. He could have emigrated at any time, but always expressed the desire to stay in his motherland and work for change from within. During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Soszhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
However, on February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. Less than a week later, the Soviets carried out reprisals against Yevgeny Yevtushenko for his support of Solzhenitsyn.
After a time in Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn was invited to Stanford University in the United States to "facilitate [your] work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution. Solzhenitsyn moved to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his Commencement Address condemning modern western culture.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked hard on his historical cycle of the Russian Revolution of 1917 The Red Wheel, four "knots" (parts of the whole) of which had been completed by 1992, and outside of this, several shorter works.
Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland. He did not become fluent in spoken English despite spending two decades in the United States; he has read works in English since his teens however, something his mother encouraged him to do. More important, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking to fit television.
Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in conservative circles in the West, and fit very well with the toughening-up of foreign policy under Reagan. But liberals and secularists were increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian patriotism and the Russian Orthodox religion. He also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and rock music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits...by TV stupor and by intolerable music."
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States. Since then, he has lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas of Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko.
Since returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn has published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones) and a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically repudiates the idea that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the work of a "Jewish conspiracy" (see chapters 9, 14, and 15 of that work). At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime.
The reception of this work confirms that Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being "absolutely right", noting that Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet bureaucracy.
Another famous Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemic study "A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he had tried to prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, anti-semitism and lack of writing skills. Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042, portraying him by the self-centered ego-maniac Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a more subtle line of argument, Joseph Brodsky in his essay Catastrophes in the Air (in Less than One) argued that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (lionized by Solzhenitsyn) and not so much to do with political ideology.
In his recent political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998)' Solzhenitsyn has criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet communism. He has defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He has also sought to "protect" the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show where he freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.
Since the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.
The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn’s selected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three published volumes has recently taken place in Moscow. |
