Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (; born in
Kislovodsk,
Russia, on
December 11,
1918) is a
Russian
novelist,
dramatist and
historian. He was responsible for thrusting awareness of the
Gulag on the world. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and was exiled from the
Soviet Union in 1974.
In the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn studied
mathematics at
Rostov State University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the
Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. During
World War II, he served as the commander of an artillery position finding company in the
Soviet 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, a
bricklayer, and a
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 Kol-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.
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 written 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 1962, and would remain his only major work to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned his youthful
Marxism and evolved toward his mature philosophical and religious positions. His 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.")
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West, but it was his monumental history of the Soviet prisons for both criminal and political prisoners that won him the most acclaim in the West. It caused as much a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West, but the attention devoted to it in the West meant that Solzhenitsyn was a marked man. The printing of his work quickly stopped, and by 1965 the
KGB had seized 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.
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 it might upset the
Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relation to it. 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. It discussed the system's origins from
Lenin and the very founding of the Communist regime. 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. On
February 13,
1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to
West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
In the West
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
Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his
condemning Commencement Address of the modern western culture.
Over the next 18 years Solzhenitsyn completed his historical cycle of the
Russian Revolution of 1917,
The Red Wheel, and several shorter works. 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.
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 never managed to become fluent in English despite spending two decades in the United States.
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. 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
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). The latter has been received as philo-semitic by some and anti-semitic by others. 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 strongly anti-semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. This came as a shock to many who considered him a hero for his opposition to the Soviet totalitarian regime. Professor
Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Sozhenitsyn 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, describing him as self-centered ego-maniac Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictator-like writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia.
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.
Historical views
During his years in the west, Solzhenitsyn was very active in the historical debate, discussing the history of
Russia, the
Soviet Union and
communism. He tried to correct what he considered to be western misconceptions.
Communism, Russia and nationalism
It is a popular view that the
October revolution of 1917 resulting in a violent
totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia's earlier history of
tsarism and culture, especially that of
Ivan the Terrible and
Peter the Great. Solzhenitsyn claims that this is fundamentally wrong and has famously denounced the work of
Richard Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues that
Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia did not practise
censorship; political prisoners were not forced into labour camps and in Tsarist Russia numbered only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union; the Tsar's
secret service was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the army. The violence of the Communist regime was in no way comparable to the lesser violence of the tsars.
Solzhenitsyn considered it far fetched to blame the catastrophes of the 20th century on one 16th century and one 18th century tsar, when there were many other examples of violence that could have inspired the
Bolshevik in other countries earlier in time, especially mentioning similarities with the
Jacobins of the
Reign of Terror of
France.
Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, arguing that
Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is that
Communism will always be
totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions that affected the outcome.
He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any way. He argued that Communism was
international and only cared for
nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling the people. Once in power Communism tried to wipe clean every nation, destroying its culture and oppressing its people.
According to Solzhenitsyn, Russian culture and people were not the ruling culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no ruling culture. All national cultures were oppressed in favour of an
atheistic Soviet culture. In Solzhenitsyn's opinion, Russian culture was even more oppressed than the smaller minority cultures, since the regime was less afraid of ethnic uprisings among these. Therefore, Russian
nationalism and the
Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the west, but rather as allies that should be encouraged.
World War II
Solzhenitsyn criticized the
Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi
Germany in the west earlier in
World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of
Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the east, as long as they could end the war as quickly and painlessly for themselves.
Stalinism
He also rejected the view that
Stalin created the totalitarian state, while
Lenin (and
Trotskij) had been "true communists". In proof of this, he argued that Lenin started the mass executions, wrecked the
economy, founded the
Cheka that would later be turned into the
KGB, and started the
Gulag even though it didn't have the same name at that time. Stalin only continued on the same brutal path that Lenin had begun.
*Mentioned in the movie,
The Rock by
Sean Connery's character, John Mason, as the last of a list of people who had been wrongly imprisoned. The interrogator, Ernest Paxton, retorted,
"Yeah, I heard of him. Didn't he play hockey for the fuckin' Redwings?"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
For the Good of the Cause (1964)
The First Circle (1968)
The Cancer Ward (1968)
The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969)
Nobel Prize delivered speech (1970)The speech was delivered only to the Swedish Academy and not actually given as a lecture.
*August 1914
(1971). The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR in an historical novel. The novel centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg (1914) in August, 1914. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story.
*The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes) (1973-78), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
*Prussian Nights (1974)
*Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1974
* Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn,
A Letter to the Soviet leaders, Collins: Harvill Press (1974), ISBN 0060139137
The Oak and the Calf (1975)
Lenin in Zurich (1976)
Harvard Commencement Address (1978) link
*The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America
(1980)
*November 1916 (1983)
*Victory Celebration
(1983)
*Prisoners
(1983)
*Rebuilding Russia
(1990)
*March 1917
*April 1917
*The Russian Question
(1995)
*Invisible Allies
(1997)
*Russia under Avalanche
(Россия в обвале
,1998) Complete text in Russian
*Two Hundred Years Together'' on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response. ([
1], [
2], [
3])
*
The Nobel Prize Internet Archive's page on Solzhenitsyn*
A World Split Apart: Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Commencement Address to the graduating class at Harvard University
*
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State" "Moscow News" (2.05.2006)
