Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Solzhenitsyn in 1974
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Александр Исаевич Солженицын
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| Born | 11 December 1918 Kislovodsk, Russian SFSR |
| Died | 3 August 2008 (aged 89) Moscow, Russia |
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| Alma mater | Rostov State University |
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Natalia Alekseyevna Reshetovskaya
(m. 1940; div. 1952)
(m. 1957; div. 1972)Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova
(m. 1973) |
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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
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Biography
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father, Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. . 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 encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944 having never remarried.
While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He pursued writing novels about repression in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage Solzhenitsyn from continuing to write. He continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1966, In the First Circle in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn was deprived of his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia. From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo 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. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995.
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
Best-known works
Much of Solzhenitsyn's work is autobiographical, based on things he saw and experienced in his own life. Solzhenitsyn was himself imprisoned in the Gulag for many years, and later was in a cancer ward (he recovered from the cancer).
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated (cleared of all charges). The manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev defended it at the Praesidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil".
Thus the lines between autobiography, reportage, fiction and political observations are tied up together, more so than with most writers.
Poetry
- Prussian Nights (1974) (Russian: Прусские ночи)
- This is a long poem. Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army's march across East Prussia, and focuses on the events that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.
Novels
- The First Circle (1968) A fuller version of the book was published in English in 2009.
- The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle of Hell in The Divine Comedy, where the philosophers of Greece, and other non-Christians, live in a walled green garden. They are unable to enter Heaven, as they were born before Christ, but enjoy a small space of relative freedom in the heart of Hell. The story is about prisoners (zeks) who are technicians or academics. They have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges after the Second World War.
- Cancer Ward (1968)
- The novel tells the story of a small group of cancer patients in Uzbekistan in 1955, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. It explores the moral responsibility – symbolized by the patients' malignant tumors – of those responsible for the suffering of their fellow citizens. During Stalin's Great Purge millions were killed, sent to labor camps, or exiled. Apart from officials who took the decisions, many more stood by and did nothing. They, too, were implicated. Others did worse: they denounced innocent people in order to gain advantages for themselves. The novel tells of how patients come to realise their part in these tragic events.
- August 1914 (1971)
- This is about Imperial Russia's defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia. The novel is an unusual blend of fiction narrative and historiography. It caused extensive and bitter controversy, both from the literary and the historical point of view. In 1984 a new version of the novel, much expanded, was published. By this time Solzhenitsyn had lived in the USA for some years. He was able to publish chapters previously suppressed, and new parts written after research at the library of the Hoover Institution. These included chapters on Vladimir Lenin which were published separately as Lenin in Zurich.
Short fiction
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
- The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history; never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed.
- For the Good of the Cause (1963)
- In a provincial town, the students of the local college help to build new college premises by doing most of the work themselves. When it is built, Soviet authorities order that the building should be handed over to a research institute; the students are told that this is "for the good of the cause". The story is an open criticism of the lack of democracy the prevailed at the time, and the lack of integrity of political leaders.
- Matryona's Place (1968)
- This is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story. The narrator, a former prisoner of the gulag, longs to return to live in the Russian provinces. He takes a job at a school on a collective farm. Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home. They share a single room where they eat and sleep; the narrator sleeps on a camp-bed and Matryona near the stove. The narrator finds the farm workers' lives little different to those of the pre-revolutionary landlords and their serfs. Matryona works on the farm for little or no pay. Helping others one night, she is killed by a train. Her character has been described as "the only true Christian (and) the only true Communist" and her death symbolic of Russia's martyrdom.
Non-fiction
- The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1973–78)
- A history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union. It was circulated in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools. The Arkhipelag GuLag (its Russian title), is both a rhyme and a metaphor used throughout the work. The word archipelago describes the system of labour camps spread across the huge Soviet Union as a vast chain of islands, known only to those who were fated to visit them.
Related pages
Images for kids
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Solzhenitsyn (right) and his long-time friend Mstislav Rostropovich (left) at the celebration of Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday
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Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Böll in Langenbroich, West Germany, 1974
See also
In Spanish: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn para niños
- Literature covering the Gulag system
- List of refugees
- Ivan Bunin
- Czesław Miłosz
- Đoàn Văn Toại
- Wei Jingsheng
- Yevgeny Zamyatin
