Everything about Alexander Solzhenitsyn totally explained
Aleksandr Isaevich 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 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, Taisia went to Moscow to study. While there 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, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Soon after this was confirmed, Isaaky was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr, who had three brothers and a sister, was raised by his mother and aunt in lowly circumstances; his earliest years coincided with the
Russian Civil War and by 1930 the family property had been turned into a
kolkhoz. Solzhenitsyn has stated his mother was fighting for survival and they'd to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific leanings, also raising him in the
Russian Orthodox faith; she died shortly before 1940. On 7 April 1940, he married chemistry student Natalya Alekseevna Reshetovskaya, whom he divorced in 1952 (a year before his release from the Gulag), remarried in 1957 and divorced again in 1972, the following year marrying Natalya Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (b. 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972) and Stepan (1973).
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 didn't question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union before he'd 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 writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend, N. D. Utkevich, about the conduct of the war by
Joseph Stalin, whom he called "the whiskered one", "
Khozyain" (The Master) and "Balabos", (
Odessa Yiddish for "boss"). He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under
Article 58 of the
Soviet criminal code, paragraph 10, and of "founding a hostile organisation" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the
Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On
7 July,
1945, he was sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police (
NKGB) to an eight-year term in a
labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
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'd a tumor removed, although his
cancer wasn't 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 gradually turned into a philosophically-minded man in prison. He repented for what he did as a Red Army captain and in prison compared himself with the perpetrators of the Gulag (
"I remember myself in my captain's shoulders boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'") His transformation 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 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'd written because I feared this would become known."
Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached
Alexander Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the
Noviy Mir magazine, 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 "libelous speech" about the leaders, and still it hadn't 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 didn't 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 it had set him free from the pretences and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which 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'd quit his teaching post when he broke through as a writer).
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. He couldn't receive the prize personally in
Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he wouldn't be let back into the Soviet Union to his family once he'd left it. Instead, it was suggested 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'd 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'd never been comfortable outside his homeland. He didn't become fluent in spoken English despite spending two decades in the United States; he's 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
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's 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 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 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
Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the early 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'd 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 Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits who 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'd 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 the
State Prize of the Russian Federation for the humanitarian work 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 this is fundamentally wrong and has famously denounced the work of
Richard Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues
Tsarist Russia didn't have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia didn't 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 which 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
Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is
Communism will always be
totalitarian and violent, wherever it's practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the outcome.
He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any way. He argued 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 the Russians than among the other peoples. Therefore, Russian
nationalism and the
Orthodox Church shouldn't be regarded as a threat by the west, but rather as allies who 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. While stationed in East Prussia as artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against civilian German population by Soviet "liberators" as the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were gang-raped to death.
Stalinism
He also rejected the view
Stalin created the totalitarian state, while
Lenin (and
Trotsky) had been a "true communist." In proof of this, he argued Lenin started the mass executions, wrecked the
economy, founded the
Cheka which would later be turned into the
KGB, and started the
Gulag even though it didn't have the same name at that time.
Mikhail Sholokhov
Solzhenitsyn was the most prominent of
Sholokhov's critics and detractors. He considered that
And Quiet Flows the Don was written by
Fyodor Kryukov, a
Cossack and
Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920. According to Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov found the manuscript and published it under his own name. The controversy raged for years, without conclusive proof on either side.
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 they 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'semphasis].
Vietnam war
In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (
A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. didn't understand the
Vietnam War. He argued that many antiwar proponents were sincere about stopping all wars as soon as possible, but 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 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 controversial public statements: notably, he characterized
Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.
Kosovo War
Solzhenitsyn has strongly condemned the
bombing of Serbia, saying "there is no difference whatsoever between
NATO and
Hitler."
Holodomor as a genocide
Solzhenitsyn says that Ukrainian efforts to have the 1930s famine recognised as a Russian genocide against Ukraine is an act of
historical revisionism.
In an interview with Izvestia newspaper he explained that the famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the Communist regime, under which all suffered equally. It wasn't an assault by the Russian people against the people of Ukraine, and that the wish to view it as such is only a recent development.
The West
Testimony to the
U.S. Congress, July 8, 1975.
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've enriched our experience, but we've lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.Further Information
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