Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Biography and List of Works

Russian author and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. In his work Solzhenitsyn continues the realistic tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and complements it with his views concerning the flaws of both East and West. Throughout the 1960s and 70s he produced a number of major novels based upon his own experiences of Soviet prisons and hospital life under the communist dictator Joseph Stalin. Later in his life Solzhenitsyn saw that his primary mission was to rewrite the Russian history of the revolutionary period in the multivolumed work The Red Wheel (1983-1991).

"He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any."
(from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian seas. His father, a tsarist artillery officer, was killed in a hunting accident six months before Aleksandr's birth.

To support herself and her son, Solzhenitsyn's mother worked as a typist. Solzhenitsy did well at school, but because the family was extremely poor, he had to give up his plans to study literature in Moscow. Instead he enrolled in Rostov University, where he studied mathematics and physics, graduating in 1941. In 1939-41 he took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. He married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaia in 1940; they divorced in 1950, remarried in 1957, and divorced in 1972. They had three sons. In 1973 Solzhenitsyn married Dmitrievna Svetlova.

During WW II Solzhenitsyn achieved the rank of captain of artillery and was twice decorated. From 1945 to 1953 he was imprisoned for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin - "the man with the moustache." Solzhenitsyn served in the camps and prisons near Moscow, and in a camp in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan (1945-53). Solzhenitsyn's double degree in mathematics and physics saved him from hard physical labour during these years, although in 1950 he was taken to a new kind of camp, for political prisoners only, where he worked as a manual labourer.

"The Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag, which, though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent - an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the Zek people."
(from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, 1974)

During his imprisonment he was sent to Marfino, a specialized prison that employed mathematicians and scientist in research. He was then transferred to a forced-labour camp in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, where he developed stomach cancer. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the South Kazakhstan village of Kok-Terek (1953-56), where he worked as mathematics and physics teacher, and wrote in secret. He developed cancer, but was successfully treated in Tashkent (1954-55). These experiences became the basis for the novels First Circle and Cancer Ward. After rehabilitation Solzhenitsyn settled in Riazan as a teacher (1957).

At the age of 42, Solzhenitsy had written a great deal secretly, but published nothing. After Nikita Khrushchev had publicly condemned the "cult of personality" - an attack on Stalin's heritage - the political censorship loosened its tight grip. Solzhenitsyn's first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, appeared the following year in the leading Soviet literary journal Novyi Mir. It marks the beginning of Soviet prison-camp literature. Solzhenitsyn uses third-person direct speech to examine Soviet life through the eyes of a simple Everyman. Written in a direct style, it describes the horrors of just one day in a labour camp. The book found success both in the USSR and the West, and was compared with Fedor Dostoyevsky's novel House of the Dead.

'"When they announced on the radio that some new machine had been invented, I heard Matryona grumbling out in the kitchen, "New ones all the time, nothing but new ones. People don't want to work with the old ones any more, where are we going to store them all?"'
(from 'Matryona's Home', 1963)

Novyi Mir also published the stories 'Matryona's Home' and 'Incident at Krechetovka' Station but rejected Cancer Ward (1968), in which Kostoglotov, the protagonist, is a semi-authorial figure. The characters confront questions of life and death, truth and falsehood - emphasized by the discussion of Lev Tolstoi's What Do Men Live For? In the ward. Stalinism is paralleled with the tragedy of those in the hospital suffering from cancer: an informer has cancer of the tongue. The Fist Circle (1968) is set during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and paints a picture of a class of intellectuals, research scientists, caught up in the system of prisons and camps. They are forced to work for the secret police, and debate endlessly about politics and the principles of morality. The title of the book refers to the least painful circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno. However, if the prisoners do not produce satisfactory work, they will find themselves in the lower circles of the labour camps.

The period of official favour lasted only a few years. Between 1963 and 1966 Solzhenitsyn managed to publish only four stories and finally all his manuscripts were censored. Khrushchev himself was forced into retirement in 1964. The KGB confiscated the novel V KRUGE PERVON and other writings in 1965 and Solzhenitsyn circulated an open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers' Union. He was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1969, but his unpublished manuscripts were smuggled into the West from 1971. These works secured Solzhenitsyn's international fame as one of the most prominent opponents of Soviet government policies.

Rejecting the ideology of his youth, Solzhenitsyn came to believe that the struggle between good and evil cannot be resolved among parties, classes or doctrines, but is waged within the individual human heart. These Tolstoian views and the search for Christian morality were considered radical in the ideological atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Solzhenitsyn assumed the role of an observer similar to the great 19th-century Russian writers who prided themselves on their truthful depiction of the society. He became a chronicler, a witness whose own experiences are part of the way to approach truth and judge. Thus he could shift from a "neutral" third-person narrative to a direct transcription of the unuttered thoughts of his protagonists, use kaleidoscopic sequences of events and numerous personal testimonies, and extrapolate from individual case histories. "Where can I read about us? Will that be only in a hundred years?" says a woman in Cancer Ward.

As with Boris Pasternak, the Soviet government denounced Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize as a politically hostile act. The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973. (Gulag stands for "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps.") For the work Solzhenitsyn collected excerpts from documents, oral testimonies, eyewitness reports, and other material. The detailed account of the network of prison and labour camps - scattered like islands in a sea - in Stalin's Russia, angered the Soviet authorities and Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason. In 1974 the author was exiled from the Soviet Union. He lived in Switzerland before moving to the United States in 1976, where he continued to write a series called The Red Wheel, an epic history of the events that led to the Russian Revolution. August 1914 (1971), constructed in fragmented style, focuses on the defeat of the Russian Second Army in East Prussia. For the novel Solzhenitsyn employs documents, proverbs, songs, newspapers, and imitation film scripts, although he remained unsympathetic towards intentionally experimental, avant-garde literature. With these technical devices Solzhenityn manages to create a broad social picture of this crucial moment of history.

"Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the Gulag, had exposed his major weakness. Whatever its origins - and I suspect it was born early in his life - an overpowering repression would not allow him to penetrate below the conscious level of his mind. In his earlier works this did not matter, for he was able to externalise his unconscious: the savage, Inferno-esque vision of Gulag is, in a sense, a projection of his own repressed violence - on a gargantuan scale, because of the intensity of the repression. Lacking a strong fictive sense, he could never have invented and Inferno, as Dante did; he didn't need to, because this Russian Inferno existed. He hacked the salamander out of the ice. No one else in world literature, ever, could have done it."
(D.M. Thomas in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1998)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1994. The new regime, led by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, offered to restore his citizenship in 1990, and the following year his treason charges were formally dropped. Solzhenitsyn made a sensational whistle-stop tour through Siberia, becoming a highly popular figure. President Yeltsin also received Solzhenitsyn and in 1994 he gave an address to the Russian Duma.

Solzhenitsyn settled in Moscow, where he has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularisation. The Western democratic system means for Solzhenitsyn "spiritual exhaustion" in which "mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints." "We have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being." (From a speech given in Harvard in 1978) Sozhenitsyn's traditional Russian ideals were already made explicit in the character of Matryona in 'Matryona's House' from the 1960s, in which the narrator meets a saintly woman, whose life has been full of disappointments but who helps others. "We had lived side by side her and had never understood that she was the righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand."

Solzhenitsyn's message is clear - the only salvation is to abandon the materialist worldview and return to the virtues of Holy Russia. On the other hand he has been accused of ignoring Russian chauvinism.

The Solzhenitsyn Prize for Russian writing was established in 1997. Since his return Solzhenitsyn has published several works, but in the West his views have not gained their former interest. However, the essay Rebuilding Russia (1990) was widely read and engendered much debate. Solzhenitsyn's later books include ROSSIYA V OBVALE (1998, Russia Collapsing), an attack on Russia's business circles and government, published by Viktor Moskvin. The first printing was of 5 000 copies.

"A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
(from The First Circle, 1968)

For further reading: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels by Abraham Rothberg (1971); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Kathryn B. Feuer (1976); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by S. Allaback (1978); Solzhenitsyn in Exile by J.B. Dunlop, et al. (1985); Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision by E.E.E. Ericson (1980); Solzhenitsyn: A Biography by M. Scammell (1985); The Great Reversal by Paul N. Siegel (1991); Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World by Edward E. Ericson (1993); One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A Critical Companion, ed. by Alexis Klimoff (1997); Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century of His Life by D.M. Thomas (1998) - See also: Heinrich Böll, Mikhail Sholokhov, Lennart Meri

ODIN DEN'IVANA DENISOVICHA, (1962)