Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Russian novelist, short fiction author, and historian.

• Born: December 11, 1918
• Birthplace: Kislovodsk, Soviet Russia (now in Russia)
• Died: August 3, 2008
• Place of death: Moscow, Russia

Early Life

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn scarcely had a childhood. He was born during the Russian civil war as White and Red armies raced back and forth across the Caucasus, where his family had long resided. His understanding of family history and of his father, who died in a freak hunting accident six months before Solzhenitsyn was born, are detailed in Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo (1971, 1983; August 1914, 1971, 1989). His earliest memory (1921) was of Soviet soldiers looting a church. His mother, Taissa Zakharovna Shcherbak, struggled to hold any kind of a job and her family’s wealth, although confiscated, made her "a social alien." These conditions encouraged in Solzhenitsyn precocity, self-reliance, and self-discipline. Living in harsh circumstances was valuable preparation for the rigors of war and the prison camps he would later endure.

Raised by his mother and an aunt, Solzhenitsyn labored harder on household chores than most boys, read voraciously, always made top marks in school in Rostov-on-Don, and wrote tales and journals regularly from age ten. He read Leo Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir (1865–1869; War and Peace, 1886) ten times and read Vladimir Dahl’s collection of Russian proverbs. Other of his favorites were William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Charles Dickens, Jack London, and Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. Though Solzhenitsyn idolized Tolstoy, he termed Maxim Gorky Russia’s greatest writer. In 1936, Solzhenitsyn began to research World War I in preparation for a history of the Russian Revolution, his main task in life, as he had known from early childhood.

Top marks earned Solzhenitsyn admittance to the University of Rostov on scholarship and without entrance examinations or inquiry into his social origins. Continued top marks, along with his activities in Komosol (the youth wing of the Communist Party), earned for him a lucrative Stalin scholarship. In the summer of 1939, he was enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Literature, Philosophy, and History (MILFI), and he was moved by his first visit to that city. On April 27, 1940, he married fellow-student Natalia Reshetovskaya. He graduated from the University of Rostov in June 1941, and applied for a position as a village schoolmaster instead of one of the prestigious positions that his top marks warranted. On June 22, war was declared. Solzhenitsyn was initially not permitted to enlist because of an old groin injury, but total mobilization on October 16 made him a private soldier.

Life’s Work

Solzhenitsyn’s military career began as a farce and ended as a tragedy, but he regarded it as a central part of his life’s work. He was defending the Soviet Union and Leninism, and he studied and wrote, not knowing his letters were being intercepted. Assigned to the Seventy-fourth Horse-Drawn Transport Battalion of the Stalingrad Command, Solzhenitsyn spent the winter mostly mucking stables. On March 22, 1942, he learned through an old friend of the need of a courier to Stalingrad. Solzhenitsyn volunteered and managed to get assigned to artillery school. Commissioned as a lieutenant in October, Solzhenitsyn served in several locations through the winter and in April, 1943, was assigned to Orel, about midway between Rostov and Moscow.

Now a battery commander, Solzhenitsyn was always on the front lines, because his mission was to locate enemy gun positions by measuring their sounds. He served in the decisive Battle of Orel in July, 1943, was decorated with the Order of the Patriotic War, and pursued the Germans toward Poland. The Soviets crossed the Dnieper River in February, 1944. Solzhenitsyn was wounded and promoted to captain, and the advance continued. The so-called Last Offensive, aimed at Berlin, began in January, 1945. Solzhenitsyn, disobeying Stalin’s orders to loot everything in just revenge, felt sympathy for conquered peoples and restrained his battery, although he did take some rare Russian books from a house and appropriated stacks of white, blank paper from a Prussian post office.

Solzhenitsyn was stunned by the sight of liberated Soviet prisoners of war, but received a different kind of shock on February 9, 1945. He was summoned to his commanding general’s office, arrested by Smersh (counterintelligence) agents, and stripped of his insignia. He was accused of making derogatory statements about Stalin in his private letters. Solzhenitsyn arrived at the famous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on February 20, where procedures for receiving prisoners had been crafted into a fine art over twenty-five years. The process is described in the arrest of Volodin at the end of V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle , 1968). Solzhenitsyn was charged with creating anti-Soviet propaganda and of founding a hostile organization. On July 27 he was sentenced to eight years by the Special Court.

Solzhenitsyn served eight years in various prison camps, working as a miner, bricklayer, and foundryman, experiences which are immortalized in The First Circle, the three volumes of Arkhipelag GULag, 1918–1956: Opyt Khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya (1973–1975; The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation , 1974–1978), and other writings. Like Gleb Nerzhin in The First Circle, he accommodated himself to camp society. Seen from outside, Nerzhin’s life was unhappy, nearly hopeless, but he was secretly happy in that unhappiness. In the camps he got to know people and events he could have learned nowhere else.

Solzhenitsyn’s sentence was officially ended February 9, 1953, and he was exiled in perpetuity to Kok Terek, Kazakhstan, 250 miles from China. He slept in ecstasy in the open on March 5, heard of Stalin’s death the next day, and wrote the poem "The Fifth of March." After administrative technicalities, in May he began teaching math, physics, and astronomy in the high school at Kok Terek, population four thousand, about equally divided between natives and exiles. His teaching was interrupted at the end of 1953 by the diagnosis of cancer and by his two treatments in Tashkent, a thousand miles to the west, in 1954. It is not known how literally autobiographical the case of Oleg Kostogolotov in Rakovy Korpus (1968; Cancer Ward , 1968) is, but his own tumor was most serious (one had been removed in the camps) and treatment and recovery were difficult. During his captivity and exile, Solzhenitsyn turned away from Marxism and toward a philosophical version of Christianity.

The political climate changed in 1956, beginning with the secret speech of First Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev admitting the crimes of Stalin and announcing the end of Gulag and exile. In April, Solzhenitsyn’s sentence and exile were ended. He went to Moscow and was amazed to find bureaucrats almost friendly, and to be able to see his file in Lubyanka Prison and to see a prosecutor laugh at it. Solzhenitsyn found a teaching job in Torfoproduct, on the rail line a hundred miles east of Moscow. Natalia joined him there, and they were remarried February 2, 1957. In 1958, fellow Russian author Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, and there was a furor in the Soviet Union.

While polishing The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn began a tale entitled "One Day in the Life of a School Teacher." Solzhenitsyn was then an excellent and happy teacher but in May, 1959, he changed the title to Shch-854 and the scene to a labor camp in Ekibastuz. He completed it in six weeks, burned the drafts, and hid the finished copy. His first published writing, "Post Office Curiosities," on the failings of the Soviet postal service, appeared in Priokskaya Pravda in Ryazan in March, and a year later the newspaper Gulok published his article on rail service. Times were changing, yet Literaturnaya Gazeta, the organ of the Union of Soviet Writers, and other periodicals rejected his work. Solzhenitsyn had read the journal Novy mir since December, 1953, when an article entitled "On Sincerity in Literature" had appeared in it, and on November 4, 1961, he took Shch-854 to Novy mir in Moscow. The editor of Novy mir loved the story. How it became Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , 1963) and got on Khrushchev’s desk is legendary and embellished, but it was printed in Novy mir in November, 1962, and was nominated for the Lenin Prize in 1964. The vote was close, but conservatives, fearing that de-Stalinization was proceeding too rapidly, struck it from the list. Even so, Solzhenitsyn was now famous, and publishers scrambled for his works. Publication of his works in the Soviet Union, however, was denied.

Solzhenitsyn’s works circulated in samizdat (the underground literary network), and his reputation continued to grow. The First Circle and Cancer Ward were published in the West without authorization, and he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1969. The next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the crowning recognition of his rapid ascent to literary stardom. However, he refused to go to Sweden in 1970 to receive the prize in fear of not being readmitted to the Soviet Union, as his fame in the West only increased the controversy around his works in his home country. This controversial status reached a new level after the first sections of The Gulag Archipelago were published in France in 1973, despite attempts at suppression by the KGB (the Soviet intelligence service). In 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested and exiled once again.

After a brief time in West Germany, Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland. He then moved to the United States, staying for a while on the campus of Stanford University and in 1976 settling in a rural retreat in Vermont. There he made his home in closely guarded privacy with his second wife, Natalia Svetlova (they had met in 1967). Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn did not cut himself off entirely from the American society around him. In 1978 he received an honorary degree from Harvard University and delivered the commencement address. In it he was highly critical of Western countries for breeding mediocrity, stultifying fashions, mass prejudice, and civil timidity: the "legalistically selfish aspect" of the West, expressed in secular humanism, has led it to a spiritual crisis, he asserted. Welcomed by American conservatives, these and other sharply disparaging public statements caused a gradual disaffection among intellectuals and liberals.

While in exile, Solzhenitsyn began working on a project that he first conceived in 1937, when he was still in his teens: a multivolume fictional chronicle of Russian history in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917. To write this massive work, collectively titled Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel , 1989), he assembled a historical archive that included documents of all kinds from that period. The first installment, or "knot" (uzel), to use Solzhenitsyn’s own term, is the revised version of August 1914, which is more than half again the length of the original. The second knot, Oktiabr’ shestnadtsatogo (1984; November 1916, 1999), was actually published after the third, Mart semnadtsatogo (1986–1988; March, 1917). Aprel’ semnadtsatogo (April, 1917) appeared in 1991. In general, critical reaction to this ambitious work, which the author regarded as his most important, was negative. In response, Solzhenitsyn said that he was writing for readers fifty or a hundred years in the future. In 1975, he also published Bodalsia telënok s dubom (1980; The Oak and the Calf, 1980) and in 1980 the long essay "Chem grozit Amerike plokhoe ponimanie Rossii" (published in book form as The Mortal Danger, 1980), which tried to expose the misconceptions plaguing Americans’ views about Russia. In general his political remarks favored subordination of democracy and individual rights to an authoritarian regime guided by the spiritual principles of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Soviet Union restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship in 1990, and following the collapse of the Communist government, he and his wife returned to Russia to live in Moscow in 1994. He continued to be a controversial figure. Over the next decade he published eight short stories, prose poems, and a memoir of his years in Vermont. In Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiiu? (1990; Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, 1991), Russkii vopros (1995; The Russian Question, 1994), and Rossiia v obvale (1998; Russia in Collapse, 2006), he lambasted Russia’s infant democracy for the greediness of its wealthy class and general excesses, and while steadfastly dismissing those who harbored nostalgia for the Communist era, he urged Russians to cultivate a self-critical patriotism and to reunify the former Soviet territories.

In 2001, Solzhenitsyn issued Dvesti let vmeste (1795–1995) (two hundred years together), concerning Jews in Russian history. In this work he adamantly denies the claim that the Soviet state began because of a Jewish conspiracy; the October Revolution, he argues, is a myth generated by the Bolsheviks, who in reality staged a brilliant, violent coup d’état. Nonetheless, because Solzhenitsyn also insists that the Jews were disproportionately represented in the early Soviet hierarchy and remain the leaders in controlling global capital, some critics accused him of anti-Semitism. He also was assailed for alleged narrow-mindedness in his allegiance to Russian Orthodoxy and for egoism. Briefly, he had his own television shows to broadcast his views, and his public pronouncements often astonished and angered non-Russians, such as his condemnation of bombing in Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in which he said that there is no difference between NATO and Hitler.

Among his many awards, Solzhenitsyn received the Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger from France in 1969, Stanford University’s Freedoms Foundation Award in 1976, the Templeton Prize for progress in religion in 1983, the National Arts Club’s Medal of Honor for Literature in 1993, and Russia’s State Award for humanitarian achievement in 2007, presented personally by President Vladimir Putin. Solzhenitsyn died from heart failure on August 3, 2008, in Moscow.

Significance

Solzhenitsyn was a poet and a prophet, a master storyteller with an incredible capacity for details. He was accomplished in many genres, and he had a mission to tell the truth about what happened in the Soviet Union in his lifetime. Solzhenitsyn believed that his experiences and knowledge of eyewitness sources justify the placing of August 1914 and subsequent volumes in a category beyond historical fiction. As a historian and political commentator, he attracted wide public attention in post-Soviet Russia, particularly among nationalist conservatives.

Students and critics will be sorting out Solzhenitsyn’s distinctive contributions for many years. The volume of his works, the copies sold, and the different languages into which his works have been translated are enormous, and they mark his legacy.

Author Works

Drama:

Svecha na vetru, pb. 1968 (Candle in the Wind, 1973)

Olen'i shalashovka, pb. 1968 (The Love Girl and the Innocent, 1969; also known as Respublika truda)

Dramaticheskaya trilogiya-1945: Pir Pobediteley, pb. 1981 (Victory Celebrations, 1983)

Plenniki, pb. 1981 (Prisoners, 1983)

Long Fiction:

Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, 1962 (novella; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963)

Rakovy korpus, 1968 (Cancer Ward, 1968)

V kruge pervom, 1968 (The First Circle, 1968)

Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo, 1971, expanded version 1983 (August 1914, 1972, expanded version 1989 as The Red Wheel)

Lenin v Tsyurikhe, 1975 (Lenin in Zurich, 1976)

Krasnoe koleso, 1983–1991 (includes Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo, expanded version 1983 [The Red Wheel, 1989]; Oktiabr’ shestnadtsatogo, 1984 [November 1916, 1999]; Mart semnadtsatogo, 1986–1988; Aprel’ semnadtsatogo, 1991)

Miscellaneous:

Sochineniya, 1966

Six Etudes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1971

Stories and Prose Poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1971

Mir i nasiliye, 1974

Sobranie sochinenii, 1978–1983 (10 volumes)

Izbrannoe, 1991

The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, 2006 (Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney, editors)

Nonfiction:

Les Droits de l'écrivain, 1969

Nobelevskaya lektsiya po literature 1970 goda, 1972 (The Nobel Lecture, 1973)

A Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia, 1972

Solzhenitsyn: A Pictorial Autobiography, 1972

Arkhipelag GULag, 1918–1956: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, 1973–1975 (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1974–1978)

Iz-pod glyb, 1974 (From Under the Rubble, 1975)

Pis'mo vozhdyam Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1974 (Letter to Soviet Leaders, 1974)

Amerikanskiye rechi, 1975

Bodalsya telyonok s dubom, 1975 (The Oak and the Calf, 1980)

Warning to the West, 1976

The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions About Russia Imperil America, 1980

East and West, 1980

Kak nam obustroit' Rossiiu?: Posil'nye soobrazheniia, 1990 (Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, 1991)

Russkii vopros, 1994 (The Russian Question: At the End of the Twentieth Century, 1994)

Invisible Allies, 1995

Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: ocherki izgnaniia, 1998–2003 (The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile)

Dvesti let vmeste, 1795–1995, 2001–02 (Two Hundred Years Together)

Poetry:

Etyudy i krokhotnye rasskazy, 1964 (translated in Stories and Prose Poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1971)

Prusskie nochi, 1974 (Prussian Nights, 1977)

Screenplay(s):

Znayut istinu tanki, 1981

Tuneyadets, 1981

Short Fiction:

Dlya pol'zy dela, 1963 (For the Good of the Cause, 1964)

Dva rasskaza: Sluchay na stantsii Krechetovka i Matryonin dvor, 1963 (We Never Make Mistakes, 1963, also known as An Incident at Krechetovka Station)

Krokhotnye rasskazy, 1970

Rasskazy, 1990

Armeiskie rasskazy, 2001

Bibliography

Allaback, Steven. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. New York: Taplinger, 1978. A short discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s four best-known works. Provides an easy way to become acquainted with the basics of these stories.

Berman, Ronald, ed. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980. Important for students of world affairs. Most Americans were hurt that the famous victim of Soviet dictatorship did not love the United States as much as he hated dictatorship.

Brown, Edward J. Russian Literature Since the Revolution. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Describes the literary environment in which Solzhenitsyn wrote and provides helpful background and context. Contains a select bibliography.

Burg, David, and George Feifer. Solzhenitsyn. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1972. The best early biography, clearly written and easy to read. Written while Solzhenitsyn was still in Russia, so it is incomplete in major respects. Includes a short bibliography, eight pages of illustrations, and a helpful chronology.

Dunlop, John B., Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson, eds. Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1985. An excellent source for the serious student researching Solzhenitsyn’s exile and its consequences. Contains a select bibliography.

Ericson, Edward E. J., and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds. The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005. Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006. Compiled with the Solzhenitsyn family’s collaboration, the poems, stories, essays, and book excerpts in this large volume admirably convey Solzhenitsyn’s moral depth and sense of drama in the forces contending for domination of the human spirit.

Kaufman, Michael T. "Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 4 Aug. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html. Accessed 5 July 2017. This obituary provides a biographical overview and discussion of the major works and their impact.

Kennedy, Emmet. Secularism and Its Opponents from Augustine to Solzhenitsyn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. An intellectual biography of Solzhenitsyn as an opponent of humanism and advocate of religion-centered government.

Mahoney, Daniel J. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. In a careful study of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, Mahoney lays out the novelist’s philosophical approach to the modern human condition and describes its impact on modern thought.

Pearce, Joseph. Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2001. Pearce traces Solzhenitsyn’s route from Marxism to Christian moralism and insists the writer is not a cultural pessimist. Based on interviews with Solzhenitsyn and previously unpublished works. Includes photographs.

Scammell, Michael. Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. A definitive biography. Thoroughly researched, including interviews with Solzhenitsyn, and remarkably dispassionate in treating controversies. Helpful in translating and explaining terms and things Russian. Includes an excellent bibliography and index.