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 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
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