Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (
Russian:
Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын,
IPA:
[ʌlʲɪˈksandr ɘˈsaə̟vʲə̟ʨ səlʐɘˈnʲitsən] ; born
December 11,
1918) is a
Russian novelist,
dramatist and
historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the
Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the
Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. In
1994, he was elected as a member of
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.
While in the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn became something of a cause célèbre in the West, earning him the enmity of Soviet regime. He could have emigrated at any time, but always expressed the desire to stay in his motherland and work for change from within. 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.
However, on February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to
West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. Less than a week later, the Soviets carried out reprisals against
Yevgeny Yevtushenko for his support of Solzhenitsyn.
After a time in
Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn was invited to
Stanford University in the
United States to "facilitate [your] work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the
Hoover Institution. Solzhenitsyn moved to
Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his
Commencement Address condemning modern western culture.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked hard on his historical cycle of the
Russian Revolution of 1917 The Red Wheel, four "knots" (parts of the whole) of which had been completed by 1992, and outside of this, several shorter works.
Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland. He did not become fluent in spoken English despite spending two decades in the United States; he has read works in English since his teens however, something his mother encouraged him to do. More important, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking to fit 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 conservative circles in the West, and fit very well with the toughening-up of foreign policy under
Reagan. But liberals and secularists were increasingly critical of what they perceived as his
reactionary preference for
Russian patriotism and the
Russian Orthodox religion. He also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant
pop culture of the modern West, including television and rock 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."
In the West 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 Ermolay returned to Russia, to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). Since then, he has lived with his wife in a
dacha in
Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west
Moscow between the dachas of
Mikhail Suslov and
Konstantin Chernenko.
Since returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn has 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) and a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (
Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically repudiates the idea that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the work of a "Jewish conspiracy" (see chapters 9, 14, and 15 of that work). At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime.
The reception of this work confirms that Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor
Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being "absolutely right", noting that
Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet bureaucracy.
Another famous Russian dissident writer,
Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemic study "A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he had tried to prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, anti-semitism and lack of writing skills. Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel
Moscow 2042, portraying him by the self-centered ego-maniac Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a more subtle line of argument,
Joseph Brodsky in his essay
Catastrophes in the Air (in
Less than One) argued that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (lionized by Solzhenitsyn) and not so much to do with political ideology.
In his recent political writings, such as
Rebuilding Russia (1990) and
Russia in Collapse (1998)' Solzhenitsyn has criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet communism. He has defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He has also 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.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One,
Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a
pianist and
conductor in the United States.
Since the death of
Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn is the
oldest living
Nobel laureate in literature.
The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's selected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three published volumes has recently taken place in
Moscow.
On June 5, 2007, Russian President
Vladimir Putin signed a decree which conferred an award for Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007 to give the award.
Return to Russia Historical and political views During his years in the west, Solzhenitsyn was very active in the historical debate, discussing the history of
Russia, the
Soviet Union and
communism. He tried to correct what he considered to be western misconceptions.
Historical views It is a popular view that the
October revolution of 1917 resulting in a violent
totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia's earlier history of
tsarism and culture, especially that of
Ivan the Terrible and
Peter the Great. Solzhenitsyn claims that this is fundamentally wrong and has famously denounced the work of
Richard Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues that
Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia did not practise
censorship; political prisoners were not forced into labour camps and in Tsarist Russia numbered only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union; the Tsar's
secret service was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the army. The violence of the Communist regime was in no way comparable to the lesser violence of the tsars.
He considered it far fetched to blame the catastrophes of the 20th century on one 16th century and one 18th century tsar, when there were many other examples of violence that could have inspired the
Bolshevik in other countries earlier in time, especially mentioning similarities with the
Jacobins of the
Reign of Terror of
France.
Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, arguing that
Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is that
Communism will always be
totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions that affected the outcome.
He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any way. He argued that Communism was
international and only cared for
nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling the people. Once in power, Communism tried to wipe clean every nation, destroying its culture and oppressing its people.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian culture and people were not the ruling national culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no ruling national culture. All national cultures were oppressed in favour of an
atheistic Soviet culture. In Solzhenitsyn's opinion, Russian culture was even more oppressed than the smaller minority cultures, since the regime was less afraid of ethnic uprisings among these. Therefore, Russian
nationalism and the
Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the west, but rather as allies that should be encouraged..
Communism, Russia and nationalism 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 as quickly and painlessly for themselves in the west.
World War II He also rejected the view that
Stalin created the totalitarian state, while
Lenin (and
Trotsky) had been a "true communist". In proof of this, he argued that Lenin started the mass executions, wrecked the
economy, founded the
Cheka that would later be turned into the
KGB, and started the
Gulag even though it did not have the same name at that time. Solzhenitsyn's negative views of Lenin and Trotsky have been proved true by the opening of the Soviet era archives in the 1990s.
Stalinism In his commencement address at Harvard University in
1978 (
A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleges that many in the U.S. did not understand the
Vietnam War. He argues that although many antiwar proponents were sincere about stopping all wars as soon as possible, they "became accomplices … in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there." He rhetorically asks if the American antiwar proponents now realize the effects that their actions had on Vietnam by inquiring, "Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from their
Vietnam?"
During his time in the West, Solzhenitsyn made a few surprising public statements: notably, he characterized
Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.
Vietnam Solzhenitsyn has strongly condemned the
1999 NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, saying that "there is no difference between
NATO and
Hitler".
Kosovo War from a BBC Address 26th March 1979
The West He described the problems of both East and West as "a disaster" rooted in agnosticism and atheism. He referred to it as "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."
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. Modern world Mask of Sorrow Anne Applebaum Alexander Galich Published works and speeches
Politics
Direct Effect
Government and administration
Peasants
Boundaries
Members of Parliament
Classes of estuary
SS career
Space-named landmarks (outside NASA and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station)