11 December 1918
A.D. Alexander Solzhenitsyn Born. Author of
Gulag Archipelago. The West is
“manless,” “ lacks courage,” and mired in “vulgar materialism.” He gave his
infamous address at Harvard University on 8 Jun 1978.
A
few notes from Wiki.
Contents
In
the Soviet Union
Early years
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol
Krai, Russia). His mother, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (née
Shcherbak) was Ukrainian.[4][5] Her father had apparently[citation needed] risen from humble beginnings, as something of a
self-made man. Eventually, he acquired a large estate in the Kuban region in the
northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met
and married Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origins and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of
his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August
1914, and in the later Red
Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with
Alexandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was
killed in a hunting accident. Alexandr was raised by his widowed mother and
aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian
Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been
turned into a collective
farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought
for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old
Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged
his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith;[6][7] she died in 1944.[8]
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began
developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914 – some of the
chapters he wrote then still survive.[citation needed] Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute
of Philosophy, Literature and History, at this time heavily ideological in
scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the
superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.[citation needed]
World War II
During the war Solzhenitsyn served as
the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red
Army,[9] was involved in major
action at the front, and twice decorated. A series of writings published late
in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!,
chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral
foundations of the Soviet regime.[10]
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing derogatory comments in private
letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich,[11] about the conduct of the
war by Joseph
Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish
rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayiθ for "master of the house").[12] He was accused of
anti-Soviet propaganda under Article
58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of
"founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11.[13][14] Solzhenitsyn was taken to
the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was
sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour
camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under
Article 58 at the time.[15]
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 (i.e., a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State
Security), where he met Lev
Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev
Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a
self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English
translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in
October 2009).[16] 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 foundry foreman. His
experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion
Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at
Ekibastuz writing.[17] While there Solzhenitsyn
had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence
ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in the
northeastern region of Kazakhstan, very close to the current border with
Russia, as was common for political prisoners. 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 his tumor went into remission. His experiences there 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,
gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Christian as a result of his
experience in prison and the camps. This turn parallels Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith 100 years earlier.[18][19][20] He repented for some of
his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the
perpetrators of the Gulag: "I remember myself in my captain's shoulder
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"). The narrative poem The Trail
(written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and
1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also
provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and
spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely
unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and
excerpted in English in 2006.[21][22]
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the
university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.[23] They had just over a year
of married life before he went into the army, and then to the Gulag. They
divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners
faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile,
they remarried in 1957.[24] They divorced in 1972.
The following year (1973) he married
his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son
from a brief prior marriage.[25] He and Svetlova (born
1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat
(1972), and Stepan (1973).[26]
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his
return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school
during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech he wrote 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 had written because I feared this would become known."[27]
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novyi 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, who defended it at the presidium of
the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added:
"There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We
must root out this evil."[28] The book quickly sold-out
and became an instant hit.[citation needed] In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer
Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During
Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied
in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of
Solzhenitsyn's, including his acclaimed short story Matryona's Home,
published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet
Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison
labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the
Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor,
but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the
1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a
man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders,
and yet its publication had been officially permitted. 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 to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Every
time when we speak about Solzhenitsyn as the enemy of the Soviet regime, this
just happens to coincide with some important [international] events and we
postpone the decision.
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful
attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, Cancer Ward,
legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied
publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and
anti-Soviet insinuations.[29]
After Krushchev's removal in 1964, the
cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's
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 Gulag Archipelago. The
seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but
gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings
of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which had come
close to second nature, but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated
Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67 the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold
Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education in a
Lubyanka Prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script
was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi
until the collapse of the Soviet Union.[30][31]
In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from
the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm
at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet
Union. 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, however, since such a ceremony and the ensuing media
coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relations with the
superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after
he had been deported from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed during 1958–67. This work was a three-volume, seven part work
on the Soviet prison camp system (Solzhenitsyn never had all seven parts of the
work in front of him at any one time). The Gulag Archipelago has sold
over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was based upon
Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 256[32] former prisoners and
Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It discussed
the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner
transports, prison camp culture, prisoner
uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile.
According to fellow gulag historian Anne Applebaum, The Gulag Archipelago’s rich and varied authorial voice, its
unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and
historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology,
made The Gulag Archipelago one of the most consequential books of the
20th century.[33]
The Gulag Archipelago was met with extensive criticism by Party-controlled Soviet press, even
though the book was not published in the USSR. An editorial in Pravda
on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites"
and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was
"choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and
grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."[34]
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.[citation needed]
In August 1971 the KGB allegedly made
an attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown biological agent (most
likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him
seriously ill but ultimately was not successful.[35][36]
In
the West
Solzhenitsyn
in Cologne, West Germany, in 1974
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was
arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt,
West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.[37] The KGB had found the
manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago and, less than a
week later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive,
including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid
tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).[38]
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn
worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The
Red Wheel. By 1992, four
"knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also written several
shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in
the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He
had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens,
encouraged by his mother.[citation needed] More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a
media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit
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 Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Richard Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf
for him to speak directly to then-President Gerald
Ford about the Soviet threat),[40] prior to and alongside
the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised
what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular 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". Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West,
Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was
one of the enduring strengths of western democratic societies. In a major
speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on
14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of
its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule
of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every
private citizen."[41]
In a series of writings, speeches, and
interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke
about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand
in Switzerland and New England during his western exile.[42][43] He "praised 'the
sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not
waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'"[44] It was sometimes
forgotten that Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism was inward-looking. He called for
Russia to “renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the
peaceful long, long long period of recuperation,” as he put it in a 1979 BBC
interview with Janis Sapiets.[45]
Return
to Russia
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn looks out from a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, before departing on a journey across
Russia. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile
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 Yermolai returned to Russia to work for the Moscow
office of a leading management consultancy firm). From then until his death, he
lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once
occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail
Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed
his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding
Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic
balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would
remain his major political theme.[46] After returning to Russia
in 1994, Solzhenitsyn 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), among many other
writings. Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show
program.[47] Its eventual format was
Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15 minute monologue twice a month; it was
discontinued in 1995.[48]
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became US
citizens.[49] One, Ignat,
is acclaimed as a pianist and conductor in the United States.[50]
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89.[37][51] A burial service was held
at Donskoy
Monastery, Moscow, on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.[52] He was buried the same
day at the place chosen by him in the monastery's cemetery.[53] Russian and world leaders
paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.[54]
Legacy
Solzhenitsyn
in 1998
The most complete 30-volume edition of
Solzhenitsyn's collected works is soon to be published in Russia. The
presentation of its first three volumes, already in print, recently took place
in Moscow. Unhappy with the economic and social malaise of the Yeltsin era, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for President Vladimir
Putin's attempts to restore a sense of national pride in
Russia. Putin signed a decree conferring on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian
Federation for his humanitarian work and
personally visited the writer at his home on 12 June 2007 to present him with
the award.[citation needed]
Solzhenitsyn continues to be met with
controversy in Russia. In February 2010, young left-wing activists in Moscow
organized protests against measures by the government in renaming the Great
Communist Street in Moscow in honor of
Solzhenitsyn. The protesters cited the activities and literature of Solzhenitsyn
for their position.[55]
KGB
operations against Solzhenitsyn
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family
and cut his communications with Soviet
dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp
Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB
Directorates).[56] The residencies in
Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the
operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them
translated the poem Prussian
Nights), keeping KGB informed regarding all contacts by
Solzhenitsyn.[56]
The KGB sponsored a series of hostile
books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name
of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by
Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew.[56] Andropov also gave an
order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between PAUK[b] and the people around
him" by feeding him rumors that everyone in his surrounding was a KGB
agent and deceiving him in all possible ways. Among other things, the writer
constantly received envelopes with photographs of car accidents, brain surgery
and other frightening illustrations. After the KGB harassment in Zurich,
Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others and surrounded his property
with a barbed
wire fence. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of
Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his
"reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life",
so no further active
measures would be required.[56]
Accusations
of collaboration with NKVD
In his book The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn states that he was recruited to report to the NKVD on fellow
inmates and was given a code-name Vetrov, but due to his transfer to another
camp he was able to elude this duty and never produced a single report.[57]
In 1976, after Solzhenitsyn was
expelled from the Soviet
Union a report signed by Vetrov surfaced. After a copy of the
report was obtained by Solzhenitsyn he published it together with a refutation
in the Los
Angeles Times (published 24 May 1976).[57] In 1978 the same report
was published by journalist Frank
Arnau in a socialist Western
German magazine Neue Politik.[58] However, according to
Solzhenitsyn the report is a fabrication by the KGB. He claimed that the report is dated 20 January 1952 while all Ukrainians
were transferred to a separate camp on 6 January and they had no relation to
the uprising in Solzhenitsyn's camp on 22 January. He also claimed that the
only people who might in 1976 have access to a "secret KGB archive"
were KGB agents themselves. Solzhenitsyn also requested Arnau to put the
alleged document to a graphology test but Arnau refused.[57]
In 1990 the report was reproduced in
Soviet Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal among the memoirs of L.A. Samutin,[59] a former ROA
soldier and Gulag inmate who was an erstwhile supporter of Solzhenitsyn, but
later became his critic. According to Solzhenitsyn, publication of the Samutin
memoirs was canceled at the request of Samutin's widow, who stated that the
memoirs were in fact dictated by the KGB.[57]
Views
on history and politics
"Men have forgotten God"
Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn
declared:
Over a half century ago, while I was
still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following
explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have
forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent
well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I
have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and
have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away
the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as
concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed
up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to
repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."[60]
On Russia and the Jews
If
I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps
was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust
national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different.
The Jews whose experience I saw – their life was softer than that of others.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 2003.[61]
The book became a best-seller in
Russia. Solzhenitsyn begins this work with a plea for "patient mutual
comprehension" on the part of Russians and Russian Jews. The author writes
that the book was conceived in the hope of promoting "mutually agreeable
and fruitful pathways for the future development of Russian-Jewish
relations".[66]
There is sharp division on the
allegation of anti-Semitism. From Solzhenitsyn's own essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the
Life of Nations",[67] he calls for Russians and
Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both
communities who enthusiastically supported a Marxist dictatorship after the October Revolution. At the end of chapter 15, he writes that Jews must answer for the
"revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russian Gentiles
must repent "for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for... crazed revolutionary
soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other
peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God."[68] Writing of Solzhenitsyn's
novel August 1914 in the New York Times on 13 November
1985, the American historian Richard
Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of
anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do
with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally
religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoyevsky, who was a
fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is
unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the
Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".[69] But Solzhenitsyn
emphatically rejected this “extreme right-wing” position as “myopic and facile”
in chapter nine of Two Hundred Years Together: “No, it would be quite
wrong to say that the Jews ‘organized’ the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, just
as it was not organized by any other nation as such.” And in a chapter in
1998’s Russia in Collapse entitled “The Maladies of Russian Nationalism”
Solzhenitsyn excoriated the extreme right wing’s preoccupation with Jews and
Free Masons.[70]
According to D. M. Thomas, Elie Wiesel said Solzhenitsyn is not an anti-Semite: "He is too intelligent, too
honest, too courageous, too great a writer." He says he wishes
Solzhenitsyn were more sensitive to Jewish suffering, but believes the
insensitivity is unconscious. This statement however predates the publication
in 2001 of "Two Hundred Years Together" by at least 3 years.[71]
Similarities between Two Hundred
Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR
and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to
inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself
claims that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then
manipulated, forty years ago.[65][72] However, according to the
historian Semyon
Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's
authorship.[73]
On new Russian "democracy"
In some of his later political
writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse
(1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian
'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended
moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to radical 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 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 had 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.[citation needed]
The West
Delivering the commencement address at
Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered
from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few
were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United
States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation
in the Vietnam
War. He criticized the country's music as intolerable and
attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. He said that the West erred in
measuring other civilizations by its own model. While faulting Soviet society
for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being
too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and
never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of
human possibilities."[39]
Russian culture
In his 1978 Harvard address,
Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture, that the West erred in "denying
its autonomous character and therefore never understood it "[39]
Communism, Russia and nationalism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the
significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian
Empire of the House
of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did
not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit,[74] that political prisoners
typically were not forced into labor
camps,[75] and that the number of
political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of those in the
Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, was only present
in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.[citation needed]
According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians
were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all ethnic
cultures have been oppressed in favor of an atheistic Marxism. Russian culture
was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the
regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among
any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.[76]
In "Rebuilding Russia," an
essay first published in 1990 in "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Solzhenitsyn urged Russia to cast off all non-Slav republics, which
he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a
new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.[4]
In 2006 Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring
Russia under its control; he claimed this was visual because of its
"ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia".[77] In an 2006 interview with
Der
Spiegel he stated "This was especially
painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined
by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on
different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families
could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military
bloc."[78]
Solzhenitsyn said that for every
country, great power status deforms and harms the national character and that
he has never wished great power status for Russia. He rejected the view that
the USA and Russia are natural rivals, saying that before the [Russian]
revolution, they were natural allies and that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the Confederacy], and then they were allies in the First World War. But beginning with
Communism, Russia ceased to exist and the confrontation was not at all with
Russia but with the Communist Soviet Union.[citation needed]
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 an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against the civilian German
population by Soviet "liberators" as
the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women
were gang-raped to death. He wrote a poem entitled
"Prussian
Nights" about these incidents. In it, the first-person
narrator seems to approve of the troops' crimes as revenge for German atrocities,
expressing his desire to take part in the plunder himself. The poem describes
the rape of a Polish woman whom the Red
Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.[79]
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's emphasis].[80]
Vietnam War
Once in the United States,
Solzhenitsyn urged the United States to reconsider its attitudes to the Vietnam War (which had ended in April 1975). In his commencement address at Harvard
University in 1978,[39] Solzhenitsyn alleged that
many in the US did not understand the Vietnam
War. He rhetorically asks if the American Anti-War Movement
ever realized the effects their actions had on Vietnam: "But members of
the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far
Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million
people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from
there?"[39]
The Holodomor
Published
works and speeches
- Solzhenitsyn,
Aleksandr Isaevich, A Storm in the Mountains .
- ——— (1962), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (novella) .
- ——— (1963), An Incident at Krechetovka Station (novella) .
- ——— (1963), Matryona's Place (novella) .
- ——— (1963), For the Good of the
Cause (novella) .
- ——— (1968), The First Circle (novel), Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle, transl .
- ——— (1968), Cancer Ward (novel)
- ——— (1969), The Love-Girl
and the Innocent (play) , a.k.a. The
Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
- ——— (1970), Laureate lecture (delivered in writing and not actually given as a lecture), Nobel
prize, Swedish academy, retrieved 23 August
2012 .
- ——— (1971), August 1914 (historical novel) . The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the
disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August
1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works,
similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
- ——— (ca.
1958–68), The Gulag Archipelago, Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle, transl (published 1973–78) Check date
values in:
|date=
(help) (three volumes), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of
developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
- ——— (1951), Prussian Nights (poetry) (published 1974) .
- ——— (10
December 1974), Nobel Banquet (speech), City Hall, Stockholm .[82]
- ——— (1974), A
Letter to the Soviet leaders, Collins: Harvill Press, ISBN 0-06-013913-7 .
- ——— (1975), The Oak and the Calf .
- ——— (1976), Lenin
in Zürich ; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them
published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them
was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August
1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original
version of the novel[83]) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
- ——— (3 to the
Americans in 1975 and 2 to the British in 1976), Warning to the West
(5 speeches) (published 1976b) Check date
values in:
|date=
(help).
- ——— (8 June
1978), Harvard Commencement Address, Columbia, retrieved 23 August 2012 (Also here [2] with video)
- ——— (1980), The
Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to
America .
- ——— (1983), Pluralists
(political pamphlet) .
- ——— (1983b), November 1916 (novel), The Red Wheel .
- ——— (1983c), Victory
Celebration .
- ——— (1983d), Prisoners .
- ——— (10 May
1983), Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag (address), London:
Templeton Prize .
- ——— (1984), August
1914 (novel) (much-expanded ed.) .
- ——— (1990), Rebuilding
Russia .
- ——— (1990), March
1917 .
- ———, April
1917 .
- ——— (1995), The
Russian Question .
- ——— (1997), Invisible Allies, Basic Books, ISBN 978-1-887178-42-6
- ——— (1998), Россия в обвале [Russia under
Avalanche] (Geo cities) (political pamphlet) (in Russian), Yahoo, archived from the original on 25 October 2009
- ——— (2003), Two Hundred Years
Together on
Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.[84][85]
- ——— (August 2011),
"Apricot Jam: and Other Stories", Translated by Kenneth Lantz and Stephan Solzhenitsyn, Counterpoint Cite uses
deprecated parameters (help).
Unpublished
works
In 200 Years Together, Chapter 20: In the Camps of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his play
'Republic of Labour' describing the events that happened in the camp Bolshaya
Kaluzhskaya 30. Solzhenitsyn goes on to describe the hostile antipathy the play
aroused from his Jewish friends.
TV
documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
On 12 December 2009, the Russian
channel Rossiya K showed the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de
l'Archipel du Goulag [The Secret History of the Goulag Archipel][91] made by Jean Crépu
and Nicolas Miletitch[92] and translated
into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya “Arkhipelaga Gulag” (Secret
History: The Gulag Archipelago). The documentary covers events related to
creation and publication of The Gulag
Archipelago.[91][93][94]
Notes
1.
Jump up ^ His father's given name was Isaakiy, which
would normally result in the patronymic Isaakievich; however, the forms Isaakovich
and Isayevich both appeared in official documents, the latter becoming
the accepted version.
2.
Jump up ^ KGB gave Solzhenitsyn a code name
"PAUK", which means "a spider" in Russian.
References
10.
Jump up ^ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich (1999), Протеревши глаза: сборник (Proterevshi glaza:
sbornik) [Proterevshi eyes: compilation] (in Russian), Moscow: Nash
dom; L'Age d'Homme .
14.
Jump up ^ Björkegren,
Hans; Eneberg, Kaarina (1973), "Introduction", Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, Henley-on-Thames: Aiden Ellis, ISBN 0-85628-005-4 .
18.
Jump up ^ "Part
IV", The Gulag Archipelago .
19.
Jump up ^ Mahoney,
Daniel J (1 September 2008), "Hero of a Dark Century", National
Review: 47–50 .
21.
Jump up ^ Solzhenitsyn
(1999), Протеревши глаза: сборник (Proterevshi glaza: sbornik) [Proterevshi
eyes compilation], Moscow: Nash dom—L'age d'Homme .
28.
Jump up ^ Benno,
Peter (1965), "The Political Aspect", in Hayward, Max; Crowley,
Edward L, Soviet Literature in the 1960s, London, p. 191 .
32.
Jump up ^ "Ekaterinburg:
U-Faktoriia", The Gulag Archipelago .
33.
Jump up ^ Applebaum,
Anne (2007), "Foreword", The Gulag Archipelago, Perennial
Modern Classics, Harper .
34.
Jump up ^ Current
Digest of the Soviet Press 26 (2), 1974, p. 2 .
45.
Jump up ^ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I (1980), East and West, Perennial Library, New
York: Harper, p. 182 .
46.
Jump up ^ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich (1991), Rebuilding Russia, New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux .
49.
Jump up ^ Jin, Ha (2008) The Writer as Migrant, University of
Chicago Press, p. 10, ISBN 0‐226‐39988‐5.
60.
Jump up ^ Ericson, Edward E. Jr. (October 1985) "Solzhenitsyn –
Voice from the Gulag," Eternity, pp. 23–4
79.
Jump up ^ Davies, Norman (1982) God's Playground. A History of
Poland, Columbia University Press, Vol. II, ISBN 0‐231‐12819‐3
80.
Jump up ^ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, NY: Harper & Row,
p. 18 .
Bibliography
- Ericson, Edward
E. Jr.; Klimoff, Alexis (2008). The Soul and Barbed Wire: An
Introduction to Solzhenitsyn. ISI books. ISBN 1-933859-57-1.
- Ericson, Edward
E, Jr; Mahoney, Daniel J, eds. (2009). The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and
Essential Writings, 1947–2005. ISI Books.
- Moody,
Christopher (1973). Solzhenitsyn. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. ISBN 0-05-002600-3.
- Scammell,
Michael (1986). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. London: Paladin. ISBN 0-586-08538-6.
- Thomas, DM
(1998). Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life. New York:
St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-18036-5.
Further reading
Biographies
- Burg, David;
Feifer, George (1972). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: Stein
& Day.
- Glottser,
Vladimir; Chukovskaia, Elena (1998). Слово пробивает себе дорогу:
Сборник статей и документов об А. И. Солженицыне (Slovo probivaet sebe
dorogu: Sbornik statei i dokumentov ob A. I. Solzhenitsyne), 1962–1974
[The word finds its way: Collection of articles and documents on AI
Solzhenitsyn] (in Russian). Moscow: Russkii put'.
- Korotkov, AV;
Melchin, SA; Stepanov, AS (1994). Кремлевский самосуд: Секретные
документы Политбюро о писателе А. Солженицыне (Kremlevskii samosud:
Sekretnye dokumenty Politburo o pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne) [Kremlin
lynching: Secret documents of the Politburo of the writer Alexander
Solzhenitsyn] (in Russian). Moscow: Rodina.
- ———; Melchin,
SA; Stepanov, AS (1995). Scammell, Michael, ed. The Solzhenitsyn Files.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick and others transl. Chicago: Edition q.
- Labedz, Leopold, ed. (1973). Solzhenitsyn:
A Documentary Record. Bloomington: Indiana University.
- Ledovskikh, Nikolai (2003). Возвращение
в Матренин дом, или Один день’ Александра Исаевича (Vozvrashchenie v
Matrenin dom, ili Odin den’ Aleksandra Isaevicha) [Return to
Matrenin house, or One Day’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] (in Russian).
Riazan’: Poverennyi.
- Pearce, Joseph
(2001). Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.
- Reshetovskaia,
Natal'ia Alekseevna (1975). В споре со временем (V spore so vremenem)
[In a dispute over time] (in Russian). Moscow: Agentsvo pechati
Novosti.
- ——— (1975). Sanya:
My Husband Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Elena Ivanoff transl. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Reference
works
- Askol'dov,
Sergei Alekseevich; Struve, Petr Berngardovich (1918). Из глубины:
Сборник статей о русской революции (Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi
revoliutsii) [From the depths: Collection of articles on the
Russian Revolution] (in Russian). et al. Moscow: Russkaia mysl'.
- ———; Struve,
Petr Berngardovich (1986). Woehrlin, William F, ed. De Profundis [Out
of the Depths]. et al; William F. Woehrlin transl. Irvine, CA: C Schlacks, Jr.
- Barker, Francis
(1977). Solzhenitsyn: Politics and Form. New York: Holmes &
Meier.
- Berdiaev,
Nikolai A; Bulgakov, SN; Gershenzon, MO (1909). Вехи: Сборник статей о
русской интеллигенции (Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii)
[Milestones: Collection of articles on the Russian intelligentsia]
(in Russian). et al. Moscow: Kushnerev.
- ———; Bulgakov,
SN; Gershenzon, MO (1977). Shragin, Boris; Todd, Albert, eds. Landmarks:
A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia. Marian Schwartz
transl. New York: Karz Howard.
- Bloom, Harold,
ed. (2001). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Modern Critical Views.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
- Brown, Edward J (1982),
"Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps", Russian Literature
Since the Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, pp. 251–91 .
- Daprà, Veronika
(1991), AI Solzhenitsyn: The Political Writings, Università degli
Studi di Venezia ; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija
Dobrovol'skaja.
- Ericson, Edward
E jr (1980). Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
- ——— (1993). Solzhenitsyn
and the Modern World. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway.
- Feuer, Kathryn,
ed. (1976). Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
- Golubkov, MM
(1999). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Moscow: MGU.
- Klimoff, Alexis
(1997). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
- Kodjak, Andrei
(1978). Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Boston: Twayne.
- Krasnov,
Vladislav (1979). Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the
Polyphonic Novel. Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press.
- Kopelev, Lev (1983). Ease
My Sorrows: A Memoir. Antonina
W. Bouis transl. New York: Random House.
- Lydon, Michael
(2001), "Alexander Solzhenitsyn", Real Writing: Word Models
of the Modern World, New York: Patrick Press, pp. 183–251 .
- Mahoney, Daniel
J (2001), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology, Rowman
& Littlefield .
- ———
(November–December 2002), "Solzhenitsyn on Russia's 'Jewish
Question", Society: 104–9 .
- Mathewson, Rufus
W jr (1975), "Solzhenitsyn", The Positive Hero in Russian
Literature, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
pp. 279–340
- McCarthy, Mary
(16 September 1972), "The Tolstoy Connection", Saturday
Review: 79–96
- Special
Solzhenitsyn issue 23, Spring 1977 Cite uses deprecated
parameters (help).
- Nivat, Georges
(1980). Soljénitsyne [Solzhenitsyn] (in French). Paris:
Seuil.
- ——— (2009), Le
phénomène Soljénitsyne [The Solzhenitsyn phenomenon] (in
French), Fayard
- Nivat;
Aucouturier, Michel, eds. (1971). Soljénitsyne [Solzhenitsyn]
(in French). Paris: L'Herne.
- Panin, Dimitri
(1976). The Notebooks of Sologdin. John Moore transl. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Pogadaev, Victor
A (October–December 2008), "Solzhenitsyn: Tanpa Karyanya Sejarah Abad
20 Tak Terbayangkan" [Solzhenitsyn: Without History of the 20th
Century His work Unimaginable], Pentas (in Indonesian) (Kuala
Lumpur) 3 (4): 60–63 .
- Pontuso, James F
(1990). Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
- ——— (2004), Assault
on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought (2nd ed.),
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ISBN 978-0-7391-0594-8 .
- Porter, Robert
(1997). Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
London: Bristol Classical.
- Remnick, David
(14 February 1994), "The Exile Returns", New Yorker:
64–83 .
- Rothberg,
Abraham (1971). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University.
- Shneerson,
Mariia (1984). Александр Солженицын: Очерки творчества (Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn: Ocherki tvorchestva) [Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Essays
on Art] (in Russian). Frankfurt & Moscow: Posev.
- Shturman, Dora
(1988). Городу и миру: О публицистике АИ Солженицына (Gorodu i miru: O
publitsistike AI Solzhenitsyna) [Urbi et Orbi: About journalism. AI
Solzhenitsyn] (in Russian). Paris & New York: Tret'ia volna.
- Solzhenitsyn,
Aleksandr (1980). Berman, Ronald, ed. Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections.
et al. Washington, DC: Ethics & Public Policy Center.
- ——— (1975).
Dunlop, John B; Haugh, Richard; Klimoff, Alexis, eds. Critical Essays
and Documentary Materials. New York & London: Collier Macmillan.
- ——— (1985).
Dunlop, John B; Haugh, Richard; Nicholson, Michael, eds. In Exile:
Critical Essays and Documentary Materials. Stanford: Hoover
Institution.
- Toker, Leona
(2000), "The Gulag Archipelago and The Gulag Fiction of Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn", Return from the Archipelago: Narrative of Gulag Survivors,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 101–21, 188–209
- Tolczyk, Dariusz
(1999), "A Sliver in the Throat of Power", See No Evil:
Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience, New
Haven, CT & London:
Yale University Press, pp. 253–310
- Transactions 29, The
Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA, 1998 .
- Urmanov, AV
(2003). Творчество Александра Солженицына: Учебное пособие (Tvorchestvo
Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna: Uchebnoe posobie) [Creativity Alexander
Solzhenitsyn: A Tutorial] (in Russian). Moscow: Flinta/Nauka.
- Urmanov, AV, ed.
(2003), Один деньь Ивана Денисовича АИ Солженицына. Художественный мир.
Поэтика. Культурный контекст (Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha. AI
Solzhenitsyna: Khudozhestvennyy mir. Poetika. Kul'turnyy kontekst) [One
den of Ivan Denisovich. AI Solzhenitsyn: Art world. Poetics. Cultural
context] (in Russian), Blagoveshchensk: BGPU .
- Tretyakov,
Vitaly (2 May 2006). "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘Saving
the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State’". The Moscow News.
Archived from the original on 27 May 2006.
External links
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