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Summary
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the greatest Russian novelists of the modern era. Though he was part of the Red Army during World War II he was arrested on charges of criticizing Stalin and put in concentration camps. It is in these camps that some of his most famous works were created about the Soviet labour camps notably ‘the Gulag Archipelago’ and ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’. His style of writing received acclaim throughout the world and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. .
He was among the very few men who challenged the Soviet Empire and brought out its secrets to the fore. He was gifted with prolific literary skills and a phenomenal memory and worked for over 40 years in secrecy. He unearthed some of the deadliest secrets of mass murder in the Soviet system and had a great contribution in bringing it down finally. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and he returned back only after two decades. That same year, he was voted as a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Language and Literature department. He died at his home in Moscow on the 3rd of August, 2008 due to heart failure.
Early life:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Great Russian novelist, dramatist and a historian. He was born in the Caucasus town of Kisolovodsk on 11th December, 1918. In the year 1917 the Soviet Union arose from revolution. He has three brothers and a sister who were raised by his mother and their aunt in low circumstances. Alexander was a good student with immense knowledge in mathematics. Although, he has a strong mathematical aptitude still, from adolescence he always wanted to become a writer. Before Germany attacked in the year 1941 to expand World War II, he received his graduation degree from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. His early life coincided with the Russian Civil War and by the year 1930 their family property turned into a collective farm. At that time his mother was in a very bad condition and she was fighting for their survival. After his father’s death, the young widow earned her living by working as a typist and stenographer. His father was an army officer and during that time they had to his father’s identity and background a secret in the old Imperial Army.
Alexander was very good at studies and his mother gave him full support and encouraged his literacy and scientific learning. He made his son religious. Later his mother died in the 1940. On 7th April 1940, Alexander married a chemistry student Natalya Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. As far as his education is concerned along with his graduation degree from Rostov University, he was taking various correspondence courses at the same time from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. He took part in the World War II and at that time he served as the commander of an antiartillery unit in the Red Army. He was involved as a major person of this action. Earlier, when he started his studies for mathematics although, he found the subject easy but he did not felt that he won’t be able to contribute his whole life to it. He later realized the importance of his study when he was in camp for eight long years. He said that it rescued me from my death as if he would not have been a mathematician he would not have survived there.
His mathematic skills made him to devise a method that enabled him to retain long sections of prose. Lithuanian Catholic prisoners made beads from chewed bread and he asked them to make the same chain for him as well. He considers bread to a passage that he would repeat to himself. Once he was able to memorize one passage then he moved on to the next bread. Later he wrote that by following the similar pattern at the end of his term, he was able to memorize 12,000 lines in this way.
Middle Life:
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's ambition to be a writer was fulfilled, thanks to the role played by Stalin. When he was detained in a labor camp for eight years, his tryst as a literary giant began. The works that he composed while in prison was powerful in exposing the truth of Stalin’s prison system. He met with a whole lot of hardliners who tried their best to silence this great author. But Solzhenitsyn went ahead with his ideals undeterred. He experienced both the fame of a literary giant as well as the banned victim. At the camp in Kazakhstan, he used to write on stray scraps of paper and after memorizing the content, would destroy the scraps, because any writing in the camps would be seized as contraband. Solzhenitsyn had, by the time been freed from the camps, lost all hopes in Communism and veered more towards a fervent Russian Orthodox faith. His purpose as an author had wider implications for him now.
His sentence of perpetual exile in the dusty Kazakhstan was suspended when he was 43. Shortly after that, he became a school teacher of physics and astronomy, in Ryazan, 70 mile from Moscow. At this point of time, along with his teaching responsibilities he was actively into writing and rewriting stories that he had pondered upon during his labor camp times. He was also studying by correspondence at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature in Moscow. His novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, narrated the account of an innocent man’s brutal experiences in a prison camp .Initially, he didn’t want the world to know about what he was writing in the fear of his writing being seized. The trials and sufferings of the “zeks”, as the prisoners were known, unearthed many a buried secret on its publication in 1963. It was the first published account ever of the prisoner camps of the Soviet Union and its appearance was strong enough to shake the Soviet foundations and establish Solzhenitsyn as literary master the world over.
Constant stomach pains led him to doctors who diagnosed him with a large cancerous tumor. He was now almost a pariah with the disease and this experience led him to write The Cancer Ward. It was published outside the Soviet in 1969. His desperation in the cancer clinic that he had got into is recorded in the short story, The Right Hand. Thankfully, Solzhenitsyn recovered after a combination of both medical treatment and folk remedies. In 1956, his period of internal exi8le was lifted and he was free to go anywhere he wished to. In February, he remarried his former wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya.
Leonid I. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964. And he was keen on silencing Solzhenitsyn. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter to the Soviet Writer’s Union in May, 1967. He stated how his works The First Circle and The Cancer Ward were confiscated, apart from being libeled through a planned media campaign and even prevented from giving public readings. This letter gave rise to a battle within the Writer’s union, leading to the formation of two groups of supporters- one defending Solzhenitsyn and the other supporting the party’s hard-line leadership. After 2 years, on November 4, 1969, Solzhenitsyn was voted out from the Writer’s Union on a scale of 1 to 5. This decision had flamed the risings back in Russia.
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Circumstances were such that Solzhenitsyn feared going to Stockholm to accept the prize and instead, sent the acceptance speech which was published all over. This award saw further controversies in Russia with the Soviet press alleging that the award was engineered by “reactionary circles for anti-Soviet purposes.” They even went to the extent of dismissing him as a ‘run-of-the-mill’ writer. But he was supported by many Russians even at great risk. Among them, were cellist and conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich, inmates of the Potma labor camp.
Solzhenitsyn had received worldwide recognition as literary genius. But at around this time, he got acquainted with Natalia Svetlova and both of them became drawn to each other. When he asked his wife for a divorce, she refused and held her position for several years. But he continued his relationship with Natalia and they had two sons Yermolai and Ignat. They finally got married in 1973.
His conflict with the state did not abate and they kept on preventing from writing, even receiving death threats. But Solzhenitsyn continued to write and speaking out.
Later Life:
Being exiled from The Soviet Union in 1974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent some time in Zurich before finally moving on to Cavendish in the United States. Here he received a hero’s welcome though he was harsh in criticizing western democracy as well. Mr. Solzhenitsyn mostly spent his time aloof and did not mix up with the American people. He agreed that his life was too rooted in the Russian culture for him to give it up and assimilate in the ways of the west. When he addressed the Harvard graduates in 1978 he greatly criticized the American society, press, politics and freedoms and was considered to be very insensitive to the hospitality of the host country. Many agreed that this speech was actually meant for a Russian audience rather than an American one. The authoritarian tendency of the Russian masses was clearly visible in his language. Yet it is in Vermont that he found home like surroundings and wrote some of his bulkier books ‘The Red Wheel’ being one of them.
In 1994 Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s Russian citizenship was finally restored and he left the USA for his motherland. On May 27, 1994 he landed in the Siberian northeast at Magadan which was the heart of the Gulag in the former years. Coming back after two decades touched the heart of Mr. Solzhenitsyn and he bowed down to remember the victims of the oppressive regime. Russia had by now completely changed and much was not Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s liking. As he undertook a two month journey from Vladivostok through the heart of Russia by private rail he was shocked to find the degree of corruption, crime and collapse of the state authority in almost all parts of the country. After the very first 17 stops he thought that his motherland was “tortured, stunned, and altered beyond recognition”.
After the journey was completed Mr. Solzhenitsyn had become a disillusioned man. What he came in search of did not exist anymore. Finally he settled on the outskirts of Moscow he began to voice his opinion about what he thought was the moral and spiritual decline of Russia. In this period he published eight two-part short stories, a series of reflective "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones), and a double volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002).
When Solzhenitsyn first came back to Russia people were even hopeful of him becoming the President of the country. But their hopes quickly declined as he seemed to be disgusted with the system. He called it a system of oligarchy where a few ruled rather than a democracy. Addressing the Russian parliament he said ‘this is not a democracy but an oligarchy’. He bitterly criticized both Gorbachev and Yeltsin for their foreign and reform policies. In his political writings Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998) he not only criticized the Russian democracy but also put off any nostalgia of Soviet Communism. He was a patriotic man and fought to protect the Russian Orthodox Church against foreign intrusion. He even hosted a 15 minute TV show for a year which was mostly about his monologues than questioning his spectator guests. Solzhenitsyn maintained a high profile and was constantly in the news and media.
Solzhenitsyn was however supportive of Putin and even accepted the State Prize from him in 2007. He had declined the same offer from Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He believed Putin would slowly restore the former glory of the Soviet nation. All of Solzhenitsyn’s sons became citizens of the United States and Ignat among them is particularly famous as a pianist and conductor. Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally passed away on August 3rd, 2008 due to possible heart failure at the age of 89 at his home near Moscow. He will remain one of the iconic figures of modern Russia who stood tall against a mighty regime.
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Quotations by/on
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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" Our envy of others devours us most of all. " -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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" Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. " -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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" Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. " -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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" Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. " -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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" Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory. " -
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Testimonials about
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn's literature told the true story of his countrymen's suffering and trauma. I personally have a lot of respect for his courage to do so in what would have been dangerous circumstances. He will continue to live via his literature, may God give him peace.
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