Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Biography    

             

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in the spa town of Kislovodsk in the North

Caucausus mountains. His father had died in World War I six months before his only son's birth, therefore, was

born to a widowed mother in relatively indigent circumstance.  The two lived in Rostov-on-Don. They were forced

to rent rooms and huts from private owners because the state did not provide them with a room. After fifteen

years, they were finally given a drafty room in a reconstructed stable.

 

From his boyhood, Solzhenitsyn planned to become a writer. Though Solzhenitsyn longed to study literature as his father had at Moscow University, his mother could not afford to send him to Moscow. Therefore, he embarked upon a course of study in the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Rostov-on-Don in 1937. Later, he would say that his degree in mathematics twice saved his life - teaching mathematics in a sharashka for four years of an eight-year prison camp term and again teaching mathematics to support himself in exile after his release.

 

In WW II, Solzhenitsyn achieved the rank of captain of artillery and was twice decorated. During the war, between 1944 and '45, Solzhenitsyn had corresponded with a school friend, N.D. Vitkevich, criticizing Stalin, but referring to him under a pseudonym - "the man with the mustache."Nontheless, Captain Solzhenitsyn was summoned to the office of the brigade commander where he was arrested.

 

Drafts of stories were used to support a charge of anti-Soviet propaganda against Solzhenitsyn. He was beaten and interrogated at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, and was sentenced in absentia, a common practice for the Soviet government, by a three-man tribunal of the NKGB to eight years of hard labor on July 7, 1945. He spent the next five months at correctional camps near Moscow, where he was forced to work on city building projects. In 1946, because of his mathematical expertise, he was sent to the MVB-MGB scientific research institute in Moscow, where he spent four years.

 

In 1950, Solzhenitsyn was sent to Ekibastuz, a new camp for political prisoners only, in Kazakhstan for the three years remaining in his sentence. He would later transform his experiences at that camp, working as a bricklayer, laborer, and smelter, into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. While there, he developed cancer, and was operated on but not cured. Immediately after his release from the camp in March of 1953, Solzhenitsyn served a one-month holdover at a transit camp and upon his release, learned that Stalin had just died. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to perpetual exile in Kokterek in southern Kazakhstan.

 

Solzhenitsyn spent the next three years of his life, until June 1956, in exile in Kokterek, except for a period at the end of 1953 when his cancerous tumor became life-threatening and he was sent to a cancer clinic in Tashkent, where he was cured.  In 1956, the Military Section of the Supreme Court reviewed his case and declared him rehabilitated and free to return to European Russia. At the same time, Soviet Premier Khrushchev delivered his "secret speech," denouncing Stalin.

 

Solzhenitsyn's first novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962 after a round of intense, routine scrutiny by Party officials. One Day, based upon Solzhenitsyn's experiences in the forced labor camp was published  in November 1962, and government publications made efforts - through translation into English and publication in numerous literary venues - to give maximum publicity to this book which functioned as an instrument in Khrushchev's campaign to expose Stalin's abuses.

In 1964 and '66, Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts and private archives were confiscated by secret police, and he sent a letter of protest to Premier Brezhnev in 1966.

 

In 1970, he was announced as winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Soviet press attacked this as a politically hostile act, and Solzhenitsyn was forced to decline the opportunity to accept the award in person because of his fear that he would not be allowed to return to the country. He was continually criticized by the Soviet Press and by Brezhnev himself. Efforts to award Solzhenitsyn his Nobel Award medal privately were

 

blocked by the Soviet authorities in 1972, after he spoke to reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post about his continued political persecution.

 

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. During the Cold War years, this Tolstoian view and search for Christian morality was considered radical in the ideological atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

He had been hiding his novel, The Gulag Archipelago from the authorities, fearful that people mentioned in it would suffer reprisals. But when his former assistant, after being interrogated by the KGB, revealed the location of a copy of the manuscript and hung herself, Solzhenitsyn decided to publish it in 1973. The Gulag Archipelago, some 1,800 pages, detailed Soviet abuses from 1918 onward and was Solzhenitsyn's attempt to create a literary/historical record of the vast system of prison and labor camps in the Soviet Union. Though Pravda called it a lie, foreign radio stations immediate broadcast of the text into Soviet lands could not be escaped.

 

In February of 1974, KGB officers arrested Solzhenitsyn and brought him to Lefortovo Prison, where he was stripped and interrogated and charged with treason. The next day, he was told that he was to be deprived of his citizenship and was immediately deported to West Germany. He eventually rented a house in Zurich and was joined by his wife, their three children, and his step-daughter from Svetlova's first marriage in March. Subsequent volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were published in Paris later in the year.

 

In 1975, Solzhenitsyn and his family settled in a secluded estate in Cavendish, Vermont, where Solzhenitsyn would remain for the next twenty years. Life in the United States also allowed Solzhenitsyn to be more open and outspoken about the significance of Christianity in his worldview.

 

The decreasing tensions between the US and USSR and the coming of glasnost in the 1980s paved the way for the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works in his native land, including excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago. Changing political climates meant that in 1990, Solzhenitsyn could be declared once more a citizen of the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1995.

 

Solzhenitsyn settled in Moscow, where he has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularization. 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." In modern Russia Solzhenitsyn has been labeled as "a reactionary utopian". His basic message is clear - the only salvation is to abandon materialist world view and return to the virtues of Holy Russia.

 

In 1997, Russia established the Solzhenitzyn Prize for literature in his honor.

 

“It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.”

 

 

 

 

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-).”  Books and writers. 2002. 15 Oct. 2007 <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/alesol.htm>.

 

 

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.” Wikipedia. 15 Sept. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 Oct. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Solzhenitsyn>.

 

“Biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-).” GRADESAVER. 1999-2007. GradeSaver LLC. 15 Oct. 2007 <http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/authors/about_solzhenitsyn.html>.