(First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, O...)
First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression.
(Matryona's Place, sometimes translated as Matryona's Home...)
Matryona's Place, sometimes translated as Matryona's Home, is a novella written in 1959 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First published by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1963.
(In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary ...)
In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle. With masterly and moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical and fictional protagonists, Solzhenitsyn unforgettably transports us to that time and place –
the last of pre-Soviet Russia. November 1916 is the second volume in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multipart work, The Red Wheel. This volume concentrates on a historical turning point, or "knot," as the wheel rolls inexorably toward revolution.
(This volume collects two quietly powerful short novels. I...)
This volume collects two quietly powerful short novels. In "An Incident at Krechetovka Station," a Red Army lieutenant is confronted by a disturbing straggler soldier and must decide what to do with him. "Matryona's House" is the tale of an old peasant woman, whose tenacious struggle against cold, hunger, and greedy relatives is described by a young man who only understands her after her death.
(Like Solzhenitsyn's world famous novels One Day in the Li...)
Like Solzhenitsyn's world famous novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, For the Good of the Cause, set in a new provincial school, is a scathing indictment of the victimisation of ordinary, decent people by Soviet careerist bureaucrats. Solzhenitsyn presents the conflicts between right and wrong, between the freedom of the individual and the harshness of the system with absolute sincerity and conviction.
(One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world litera...)
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state.
(First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle ...)
First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes –
including nine full chapters – were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.
(A new edition of the Russian Nobelist's collection of nov...)
A new edition of the Russian Nobelist's collection of novellas, short stories, and prose poems Stories and Prose Poems collects twenty-two works of wide-ranging style and character from the Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose shorter pieces showcase the extraordinary mastery of language that places him among the greatest Russian prose writers of the twentieth century.
(In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First ...)
In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses.
(The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vas...)
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.
(Prussian Nights is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,...)
Prussian Nights is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who served as 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 traumatic acts of rape and murder that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the...)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.
The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century
(The Nobel laureate evaluates Russian history as the centu...)
The Nobel laureate evaluates Russian history as the century ends, encouraging Russians to overcome their exhaustion and rebuild spiritual and political development by taking their future into their own hands and developing a moral and independent culture and society.
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn and six dissident colleagues who a...)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and six dissident colleagues who at the time of publication were still living in the USSR – six men totally vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, or execution by the Soviet authorities – joined in the midseventies to write a book which surely remains the most extraordinary debate of a nation's future published in modern times. Shattering a half-century of silence, From Under the Rubble constitutes a devastating attack on the Soviet regime, a moral indictment of the liberal West, and a Christian manifesto calling for a new society – one whose dominant values would be spiritual rather than economic.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and historian famous for his novels Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelago and August 1914. Solzhenitsyn also was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism.
Background
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father, Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn died before he was born. Solzhenitsyn was brought up by his widowed mother, Taisiya Solzhenitsyn.
Education
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attended Rostov High School №15. In 1936 he entered Rostov University (now Southern Federal University) as a mathematics and physics student. Simultaneously, he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. In 1941, Solzhenitsyn graduated from Rostov University with distinction.
In 1978, he was awarded an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University.
Solzhenitsyn fought in World War II, achieving the rank of captain of artillery; in 1945, however, he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write.
Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life that was a hallmark of the de-Stalinizing policies of the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn submitted his short novel Odin den iz zhizni Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) to the leading Soviet literary periodical Novy Mir ("New World"). The novel quickly appeared in that journal’s pages and met with immediate popularity, Solzhenitsyn becoming an instant celebrity. Ivan Denisovich, based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences, described a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. The impression made on the public by the book’s simple, direct language and by the obvious authority with which it treated the daily struggles and material hardships of camp life was magnified by its being one of the first Soviet literary works of the post-Stalin era to directly describe such a life. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union, where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin’s regime.
Solzhenitsyn’s period of official favour proved to be short-lived, however. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, and Solzhenitsyn met first with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. After the publication of a collection of his short stories in 1963, he was denied further official publication of his work, and he resorted to circulating them in the form of samizdat ("self-published") literature - i.e., as illegal literature circulated clandestinely - as well as publishing them abroad.
The following years were marked by the foreign publication of several ambitious novels that secured Solzhenitsyn’s international literary reputation. V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle) was indirectly based on his years spent working in a prison research institute as a mathematician. The book traces the varying responses of scientists at work on research for the secret police as they must decide whether to cooperate with the authorities and thus remain within the research prison or to refuse their services and be thrust back into the brutal conditions of the labour camps. Rakovy korpus (1968; Cancer Ward) was based on Solzhenitsyn’s hospitalization and successful treatment for terminally diagnosed cancer during his forced exile in Kazakhstan during the mid-1950s. The main character, like Solzhenitsyn himself, was a recently released inmate of the camps.
In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined to go to Stockholm to receive the prize for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return. His next novel to be published outside the Soviet Union was Avgust 1914 (1971; August 1914), a historical novel treating Germany’s crushing victory over Russia in their initial military engagement of World War I, the Battle of Tannenburg. The novel centred on several characters in the doomed 1st Army of the Russian general A.V. Samsonov and indirectly explored the weaknesses of the tsarist regime that eventually led to its downfall by revolution in 1917.
In December 1973 the first parts of Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago) were published in Paris after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. (Gulag is an acronym formed from the official Soviet designation of its system of prisons and labour camps.) The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia (1917) and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin (1924–53). Various sections of the work describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims as practiced by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn’s own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.
Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union on the following day, and in December he took possession of his Nobel Prize.
Solzhenitsyn ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. He subsequently made several public appearances and even met privately with Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin. In 1997 Solzhenitsyn established an annual prize for writers contributing to the Russian literary tradition. Installments of his autobiography, Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: ocherki izgnaniia ("The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile"), were published from 1998 to 2003, and his history of Russian Jews, Dvesti let vmeste, 1795-1995 ("Two Hundred Years Together"), was published in 2001–02.
(This volume collects two quietly powerful short novels. I...)
1963
Religion
Solzhenitsyn was brought up in Russian Orthodox faith.
Politics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He had his own unique political agenda. While most Soviet dissidents focused on the need for basic human rights, by the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn began to focus on the issue of morality. He believed that the Russian people could only be saved by a rejection of Bolshevik ideas and the resurrection of what he considered a unique set of moral values developed in Russia over centuries under the influence of Orthodox Christianity. He said that 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. Solzhenitsyn argued that Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
In presenting alternatives to the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn tended to reject Western emphases on democracy and individual freedom and instead favoured the formation of a benevolent authoritarian regime that would draw upon the resources of Russia’s traditional Christian values. He also criticized Western culture for its decadence and argued it was weakening the United States to the point where it would soon no longer be able to stand up to the communist threat.
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech in Washington, District of Columbia, on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union and this system was responsible for the Holodomor. In his interview to Izvestia he said that the 1930s famine in Ukraine was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements.
Views
Quotations:
"A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's free again."
"It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves."
"A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him."
Personality
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an ambitious and hardworking person with a stiff character.
Physical Characteristics:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had a big bushy beard. Those who knew him said that his beard helped create his image as an "embittered, angry prophet."
Quotes from others about the person
Mario Vargas Llosa: "The extraordinary political and intellectual feat of Solzhenitsyn was to emerge from the hell of concentration camp to tell the story... in books whose moral and documentary force has no parallel in modern history."
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: "Solzhenitsyn is a man of exemplary nobility and extreme bravery. A powerful novelist and an indispensable historian, he is an artist and moralist who has taken unto himself the suffering of his countrymen and has magnificently indicted a monstrous system in the name of the Soviet people and of Russian history."
Harrison Salisbury: "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgueniev, Tolstoi, Gorki."
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "He is our only living classic."
Interests
History, politics
Connections
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya on 7 April 1940. In 1952, they got divorced because the wives of Gulag prisoners were not given work or residence permits. They remarried in 1957 but divorced again in 1972.
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician. The couple had three sons who are all US citizens.
Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile
Based on exclusive, personal interviews with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Pearce's book provides profound insight into a towering literary and political figure. From his pro-Communist youth to his imprisonment in the Gulags, his exile in America to his return to Russia, this is the story of a man who struggled with the most weighty questions of humanity.
1999
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Writer Who Changed History
This book was born of an attempt to answer an American third-grader’s question: How could it be that a decorated Soviet officer was removed from the front lines and imprisoned for years simply for making a negative comment about Stalin? To help children understand how one person can “write” a wrong and change the course of history, Caulfield has penned the first children’s biography of Solzhenitsyn, sharing his extraordinary journey.
2016
Solzhenitsyn: A Biography
Draws on new materials made available by the Solzhenitsyn family and on interviews with the writer himself to create a profile of this complex personality and of the culture from which he emerged