Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын) (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. He was responsible for thrusting awareness of the Gulag on the non-Soviet world.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Born in Kislovodsk, Russia, Solzhenitsyn fought in the Red Army during World War II. He became a captain before he was arrested in 1945 for ASA or Anti-Soviet agitation, criticizing Joseph Stalin in letters to his brother-in-law. He was imprisoned for eight years, from 1945 to 1953, under the Article 58 law.

He spent some time at hard manual work in labor camps of the Gulag. He wrote about this in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Then he spent time in a sharashka, a white-collar prison labor compound. He wrote about this in The First Circle.

According to Leonid Samutin's book Do Not Create an Idol, Solzhenitsyn voluntarily became an informant and lied or kept back the facts about this in his books. [1] Leonid Samutin was a staunch anti-communist and knew Solzhenitsyn since they met in the camp. In 1970s at the request of the author Samutin kept the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago hiding it from KGB.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of forced labor (which existed during Stalin's rule) to the attention of the West, but it was his monumental history of the massive Soviet concentration camps for both criminal and political prisoners that won him the most acclaim. No longer was this an issue for anti-communists only - all Western democracies had to confront it. The Soviets, for their part, pointed out that the camps of the Gulag had been gradually closed down during the 1950s and the Gulag itself had been abolished by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960.

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 given accommodation by Stanford University 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. Over the next 18 years, spent mostly in rural seclusion, 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.

Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland. However radical he might have been in the USSR, outside that context he appeared to some to be a reactionary, particularly in his Russian nationalism and his religious orthodoxy.

In May 1997, Solzhenitsyn was elected full member (academician) of the Russian Academy of Science. In 1997 he established his own prize in literature ($25,000). Alexander Solzhenitsyn met with President Boris Yeltsin in 1994 and President Vladimir Putin in 2000. He met Putin again in 2002.

He has been criticized by some who consider him a radical; according to their claims he frequently makes connections between the activities of Jews, Georgians and Latvians and the causes of the mishaps that befell Russia in the 20th century.

Solzhenitsyn's two-volume book 200 Years Together (partially based on his 1968 manuscript Jews in USSR and in the Future Russia, in which he uses expressions such as "Lenin-Jewish revolution"[2],[3],[4]) is considered by many to be anti-Semitic. Several books and series of articles have been written to refute particular claims made by Solzhenitsyn in his work (e.g. [5],[6]).

His ex-wife Nastasya Reshetovskaya wrote a book about her life with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In it she described his purported extramarital love affairs and claimed that he begged her to allow him to continue them, as he felt they inspired his writing. Reshetovskaya also revealed the angst she experienced from her former husband's literary fame and partly blamed it for the demise of the marriage. She expressed her opinion that in The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn exaggerated the conditions of Soviet life as they affected relations between men and women.

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Published works

Main article: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn bibliography

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)
August 1914 (1971). The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR in an historical novel. The novel centres 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)
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)
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)
Two Hundred Years Together on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response. ([7], [8], [9])

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External links

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

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