Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Born	(1918-12-11) December 11, 1918 Kislovodsk, Russia
Occupation	Novelist

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪˈsaʲɘvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn] ; born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labour 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. He is the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a well-known conductor and pianist.

Biography

While in the Soviet Union

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, the son of a young widowed mother, Taisia Solzhenitsyn (née 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 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. This would be Solzhenitsyn's 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 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 the Soviet Union to his family 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. 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 a cause célèbre in the West, earning him the enmity of the 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 Solzhenitsyn 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 U.S. President Ronald 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

Solzhenitsyn boards a train in Vladivostok after returning to Russia from exile. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

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 (later, his oldest son Ermolay returned to Russia, to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). Since then, he has lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by 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 polemical study "A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he had tried to prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, antisemitism, and lack of writing skills. Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042, portraying him by the self-centered egomaniac 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 circuitous 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" (venerated by Solzhenitsyn) and much less due to more recent (Marxist) 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 the 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.

On June 5, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring an award on Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007, to give him the award.

Historical and political views

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.

He 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, the Russian culture and people were not the ruling national culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no ruling national 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 quickly and painlessly for themselves in the west.

Stalinism

He also rejected the view that Stalin created the totalitarian state, while Lenin (and Trotsky) had been a "true communist". 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 did not have the same name at that time.

The Sino-Soviet Conflict

In 1973, near the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Solzhenitsyn sent a Letter to the Soviet Leaders to a limited number of upper echelon Soviet officials. This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to

Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if the like. The main source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility and perhaps won't take place at all [author's emphasis].

Vietnam

In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleges that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He argues that although many antiwar proponents were sincere about stopping all wars as soon as possible, they "became accomplices … in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there." He rhetorically asks if the American antiwar proponents now realize the effects that their actions had on Vietnam by inquiring, "Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from their Vietnam?"

During his time in the West, Solzhenitsyn made a few surprising public statements: notably, he characterized Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.

Kosovo War

Solzhenitsyn has strongly condemned the bombing of Serbia, saying that "there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler".

The West

Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it . . . All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs.

from a BBC Address 26 March 1979

Modern world

He described the problems of both East and West as "a disaster" rooted in agnosticism and atheism. He referred to it as "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

See also

• Mask of Sorrow
• Anne Applebaum
• Alexander Galich

Published works and speeches

Main article: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn bibliography

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962; novel)
• An Incident at Krechetovka Station (1963; novella)
• Matryona's Place (1963; novella)
• For the Good of the Cause (1964; novella)
• The First Circle (1968; novel)
• The Cancer Ward (1968; novel)
• The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969; play), aka The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
• Nobel Prize delivered speech (1970)The speech was delivered to the Swedish Academy in writing 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, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
• The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes) (1973 – 1978), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
• Prussian Nights (1974; poetry)
• Aleksandr 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 0-06-013913-7
• The Oak and the Calf (1975)
• Lenin in Zürich (1976; separate publication of chapters on Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. They were later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August, 1914.)
• Warning to the West (1976; 5 speeches (translated to English), 3 to the Americans in 1975 and 2 to the British in 1976)
• Harvard Commencement Address (1978) link
• The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America (1980)
• Pluralists (1983; political pamphlet)
• November 1916 (1983; novel)
• Victory Celebration (1983)
• Prisoners (1983)
• Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag. Templeton Prize Address, London, May 10 (1983)
• August 1914 (1984; novel, much-expanded edition)
• Rebuilding Russia (1990)
• March 1917 (1990)
• April 1917
• The Russian Question (1995)
• Invisible Allies (1997)
• Russia under Avalanche (Россия в обвале,1998; political pamphlet) Complete text in Russian
• Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response. ([1], [2], [3])

External links

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
• 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
  • Audio and textual version of speech
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State" "Moscow News" (2.05.2006)
• Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death' "Der Spiegel" July 23, 2007
• Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Solzhenitsyn’s autobiography from his non-official site
• The introduction to the Book Gulag by Anne Applebaum
• Russian Memorial website to Human Rights victims
• Template:Ru icon Solzhenitsyn: biography, photos, prose, interviews, critical essays