SOURCE: Wikipedia, 2020-05-06
This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Isayevich and the family name is Solzhenitsyn.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag labor camp system.
After serving in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was sentenced to spend eight years in a labour camp and then internal exile for criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, the novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962). Although the reforms brought by Nikita Khrushchev freed him from exile in 1956, the publication of "The Cancer Ward" (1968), "August 1914" (1971), and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973) beyond the Soviet Union angered authorities, and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship in 1974. He was flown to West Germany, and in 1976 he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored in 1990, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His "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.
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SOURCE: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, 2020-05-06
Winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia. He studied mathematics at Rostov University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.
During World War II, he served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Soviet Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was thrice decorated for personal heroism. In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. The experience of the camps provided him with raw material for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which he was permitted to publish in 1962. It would remain his only major work to appear in his motherland until 1990.
Solzhenitsyn's exile was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to central Russia in 1956. He taught mathematics, astronomy and physics at a high school while continuing to write. In the early 1960s he was allowed to publish, in addition to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," only four stories, and by 1969 he was expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of the initial version of "August 1914" (the first part of "The Red Wheel") and of "Gulag Archipelago" soon brought retaliation from the Soviet authorities. In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and flown against his will to Frankfurt, West Germany.
After a sojourn in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn moved to Vermont in 1976 with his wife and sons. Over the next eighteen years, spent mostly in the quiet of rural seclusion, Solzhenitsyn would complete his epic historical cycle, The Red Wheel, as well as several shorter works. In his essays and speeches throughout the free world, he decried the weak will displayed by Western governments in the face of continuing manifestations of Communist aggression. He also warned against the dangers of encroaching materialism for East and West alike.
In May 1994, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to his native Russia via the Pacific port of Vladivostok and traveled extensively, meeting with thousands of people throughout the country. He continued to write prodigiously, publishing "Between Two Millstones," a memoir of his years in the West; "Russia in Collapse," which rounded out the quadrilogy of historical essays begun with "Letter to the Soviet Leaders," "Rebuilding Russia" and "The Russian Question;" eight "two-part" stories, exploring a new genre; twelve essays of literary criticism on twentieth-century writers; and, in 2001-03, a work on the mutual history of the Russian and Jewish peoples in Russia, "200 Years Together: 1795-1995." In 1997 the Russian Academy of Sciences elected Solzhenitsyn as a member, and in 2007 awarded him the Russian State Prize. Meanwhile, 2006 saw the beginning of the publication of a major new 30-volume collected works. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow in 2008 at age 89.
Solzhenitsyn's other works include the novels "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward;" his literary memoirs, "The Oak and the Calf," and their addendum, "The Invisible Allies;" collections of plays and early works; and numerous speeches and essays, including his Nobel Lecture and his Harvard address -- "A World Split Apart."
SOURCE: NobelPrize.org, 2020-05-06
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 1970-10-09
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the great young Soviet poet, calls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "the only living classic in Russia."
See also: The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, which supports explorations into the life and writings of the Nobel Laureate and Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
His judgment is shared by many of his literate countrymen as well as critics abroad and readers who have made Solzhenitsyn a best-seller in a dozen languages. The published bulk of Solzhenitsyn's work is small compared with that of most major writers -- and far, far smaller in terms of what has been published in his own country. His reputation is based on two major works -- "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" -- and on "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a novella, plus a handful of vignettes and two or three plays.
Of this writing only "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and a few of the vignettes have been published (in tiny editions) in the Soviet Union. That is not to say that Soviet readers do not know his other writings, but they have read them only in typescript and mimeograph copies circulating in a few hundred examples.
From the moment of publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" there has never been doubt that a great figure in the field of humane letters, a worthy successor to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bunin and Pasternak had appeared improbably in a Soviet milieu still marked by the harsh repressions of the political censors and the even harsher harassment of the political police.
What are the qualities that have marked Solzhenitsyn's work?
First and immeasurably most important has been his precise and dramatic concern for the essential human conflict of the era, the struggle of the small, ordinary Soviet man and woman to survive under conditions that seem beyond the strength of body and spirit to bear.
No one has captured the pathos of the human condition in the Soviet Union as has Solzhenitsyn, in part, perhaps, because he has lived at all. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was one day in the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a "zak," or prisoner, in one of Stalin's Siberian camps.
It is all there, put down word for word, pain for pain, agony for agony -- with the precision of a surgeon and the exactitude of a mathematician, and with the deep understanding that all of humanity is the victim of a system in which some men are brutalized by prison wardens and some are brutalized by being prison wardens.
In a review of "The First Circle" written for The New York Times, this writer said: "The concept of the world as a prison comes naturally to a Russian -- his world is a prison."
"The First Circle " was a study of the world of a prisoner, once again the prisoner being Solzhenitsyn himself. But this was no ordinary prisoner for, as the review noted, "it is Solzhenitsyn's camera eye, his absolute sense of pitch, his Tolstoyan power of characterization, his deep humaneness, his almost military discipline, and Greek feeling for the unities which make his work a classic."
Almost all the work of Solzhenitsyn that is now known grows out of the Soviet prison system, but there is no monotony, for the prison system was -- and is -- as rich and varied as life itself, embracing so large a portion of the population.
In every country critics and public have hailed Solzhenitsyn as a towering figure in 20th- century literature. And this was also true in the Soviet Union from the inception of his public career under Nikita S. Khrushchev.
But in the dour atmosphere of present-day Russia, another kind of criticism has arisen -- a political criticism that characterizes Solzhenitsyn, like other great Russian writers of the past, as rubbish. To which Solzhenitsyn, at the time of his expulsion from the Soviet Writers Union, replied: "The blind lead the blind. The time is near when every one of you will try to find out how you can scrape your signatures off today's resolution."
The body of Solzhenitsyn's known work is comparatively small, and it represents only a part of what he has created. He is now on another major work, one that his friends have said breaks new ground. It is said to be a historical subject, one that some have already begun to compare with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
Solzhenitsyn, quite clearly, is a living example of a thought he expressed in "The First Circle."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 2008-08-04
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful literary works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.
Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.
Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.
Over the next five decades, Solzhenitsyn's fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" and historical works like "The Gulag Archipelago."
"Gulag" was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Solzhenitsyn's calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times."
Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. He returned to Russia and deplored what he considered its spiritual decline, but in the last years of his life he embraced President Vladimir Putin as a restorer of Russia's greatness.
In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's decision to allow "Ivan Denisovich" to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin.
But soon after the story appeared, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they campaigned to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a traitor and confiscated his manuscripts.
But their iron grip could not contain Solzhenitsyn's reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russia's literary giants but also to Stalin's literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Iosip Mandleshtam and Boris Pasternak.
At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Solzhenitsyn from the Writer's Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period.
Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W.H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union.
That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature in the face of Moscow's protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when "in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world -- if only the whole world could have heard us."
He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged "not to participate in lies," artists had greater responsibilities. "It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!"
By this time, Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, "The Gulag Archipelago." In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.
Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had hung herself soon afterward.
He went on the offensive. With his approval, the book was speedily published in Paris, in Russian, just after Christmas. The Soviet government counterattacked with a spate of articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined "The Path of a Traitor." He and his family were followed, and he received death threats.
On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested. The next day, he was told that he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. On his arrest, he had been careful to take with him a threadbare cap and a shabby sheepskin coat that he had saved from his years in exile. He wore them both as he was marched onto an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt.
Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by the German novelist Heinrich Böll. Six weeks after his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn was joined by his wife, Natalia Svetlova, and three sons. She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts. After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vermont.
There he kept mostly to himself for some 18 years, protected from sightseers by neighbors, who posted a sign saying, "No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns." He kept writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day.
His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.
Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well -- democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: "In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been."
In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned President Gerald Ford to avoid seeing Solzhenitsyn. "Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents," Kissinger wrote in a memo. "Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn's views of the United States and its allies." Ford followed the advice.
The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. "We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn's views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on," she said. "And then Joseph said: 'But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers -- 60 million victims -- it's all true.'"
In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Khazakstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.
One story, a short novel, was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of "zeks," as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.
The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. "Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep," Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.
"The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one," Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: "Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years."
Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev's policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union's so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.
On reading the manuscript, Tvardovsky summoned Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. "You have written a marvelous thing," he told him. "You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said." He likened the story to Tolstoy's moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski's "House of the Dead," which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Tvardovsky offered Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher's annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.
Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read "A Day in the Life." Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography "Solzhenitsyn" (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."
The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1963. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work "a literary miracle." Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which "it is impossible to go on writing as one did before."
Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.
Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published "A World Apart," about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. "A Day in the Life" changed that.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk on Dec. 11, 1918, a year after the Soviet Union arose from revolution. His father, Isaaki, had been a Russian artillery officer on the German front and married to Taissa Shcherback by the brigade priest. Shortly after he was demobilized and six months before his son's birth, he was killed in a hunting accident. The young widow took the child to Rostov-on-Don, where she reared him while working as a typist and stenographer. By Solzhenitsyn's account, he and his mother lived in a dilapidated hut. Still, her class origins -- she was the daughter of a Ukrainian land owner -- were considered suspect, as was her knowledge of English and French. Solzhenitsyn remembered her burying his father's three war medals because they could indicate reactionary beliefs.
He was religious. When he was a child, older boys once ripped a cross from his neck. Nonetheless, at 12, though the Communists repudiated religion, he joined the Young Pioneers and later became a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.
He was a good student with an aptitude for mathematics, though from adolescence he imagined becoming a writer. In 1941, a few days before Germany attacked Russia to expand World War II into Soviet territory, he graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist. When hostilities began, he joined the army and was assigned to look after horses and wagons before being transferred to artillery school. He spent three years in combat as a commander of a reconnaissance battery.
In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin -- disrespectfully, the authorities said -- as "the man with the mustache." Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.
His penal journey began with stays in two prisons in Moscow. Then he was transferred to a camp nearby, where he moved timbers, and then to another, called New Jerusalem, where he dug clay. From there he was taken to a camp called Kaluga Gate, where he suffered a moral and spiritual breakdown after equivocating in his response to a warden's demand that he report on fellow inmates. Though he never provided information, he referred to his nine months there as the low point in his life.
After brief stays in several other institutions, Solzhenitsyn was moved to Special Prison No. 16 on the outskirts of Moscow on July 9, 1947. This was a so-called sharashka, an institution for inmates who were highly trained scientists and whose forced labor involved advanced scientific research. He was put there because of his gift for mathematics, which he credited with saving his life. "Probably I would not have survived eight years of the camps if as a mathematician I had not been assigned for three years to a sharashka." His experiences at No. 16 provided the basis for his novel "The First Circle," which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968. While incarcerated at the research institute, he formed close friendships with Kopelev and another inmate, Dmitry Panin, and later modeled the leading characters of "The First Circle" on them.
Granted relative freedom within the institute, the three would meet each night to carry on intellectual discussions and debate. During the day, Solzhenitsyn was assigned to work on an electronic voice-recognition project with applications toward coding messages. In his spare time, he began to write for himself: poems, sketches and outlines of books.
He also tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. After scorning the scientific work of the colonel who headed the institute, Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
At Ekibastaz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.
On Feb. 9, 1953, his term in the camps officially ended. On March 6, he was sent farther east, arriving in Kok-Terek, a desert settlement, in time to hear the announcement of Stalin's death broadcast over loudspeakers in the village square. It was here that Solzhenitsyn was ordered to spend his term of "perpetual exile."
He taught in a local school and secretly wrote poems, plays and sketches with no hope of having them published. He also began corresponding with his former wife, who during his incarceration had divorced him. He was bothered by stomach pains, and when he was able to visit a regional clinic, doctors found a large cancerous tumor.
His life as a restricted pariah struggling with the disease would lead to his novel "The Cancer Ward," which also first appeared outside the Soviet Union, in 1969. He finally managed to get to a cancer clinic in the city of Tashkent and later described his desperation there in a short story, "The Right Hand."
"I was like the sick people all around me, and yet I was different," he wrote. "I had fewer rights than they had and was forced to be more silent. People came to visit them, and their one concern, their one aim in life, was to get well again. But if I recovered, it would be almost pointless: I was 35 years of age, and yet in that spring I had no one I could call my own in the whole world. I did not even own a passport, and if I were to recover, I should have to leave this green, abundant land and go back to my desert, where I had been exiled 'in perpetuity. ' There I was under open surveillance, reported on every fortnight, and for a long time the local police had not even allowed me, a dying man, to go away for treatment."
After acquiring medical treatment and resorting to folk remedies, Solzhenitsyn did recover. In April 1956, a letter arrived informing him that his period of internal exile had been lifted and that he was free to move. In December, he spent the holidays with his former wife, and in February 1957, the two remarried. He then joined her in Ryazan, where Natalia Reshetovskaya headed the chemistry department of an agricultural college. Meanwhile, a rehabilitation tribunal invalidated his original sentence and found that he had remained "a Soviet patriot." He resumed teaching and writing, both new material as well as old, reworking some of the lines he had once stored away as he fingered his beads.
Twenty-two months elapsed between the publication of "Ivan Denisovich" and the fall of Khrushchev. Early in that period, the journal Novy Mir was able to follow up its initial success with Solzhenitsyn by publishing three more short novels by him in 1963. These would be the last of his works to be legally distributed in his homeland until the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989.
When Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964, it was apparent that Solzhenitsyn was being silenced. In May 1967, in an open letter to the Congress of the Soviet Writers Union, he urged that delegates "demand and ensure the abolition of all censorship, open or hidden."
He told them that manuscripts of "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" had been confiscated, that for three years he and his work had been libeled through an orchestrated media campaign, and that he had been prevented from even giving public readings. "Thus," he wrote, "my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered."
He added, "No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."
The letter touched of a battle within the writers union and in broader intellectual and political circles, pitting Solzhenitsyn's defenders against those allied with the party's hard-line leadership. Two years later, on Nov. 4, 1969, the tiny Ryazan branch of the U.S.S.R. Writers Union voted five to one to expel Solzhenitsyn. The decision ignited further furor at home. In the West, it intensified a wave of anti-Soviet sentiment that had been generated in 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms of the Prague spring.
The conflict grew 11 months later with the announcement that Solzhenitsyn had won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet press responded with accusations that the award had been engineered by "reactionary circles for anti-Soviet purposes." One newspaper belittled the author as " a run of the mill writer"; another said it was "a sacrilege" to mention his name with the "creators of Russian and Soviet classics."
But there were also Russians willing to defend Solzhenitsyn. The eminent cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich wrote to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, and other leading newspapers praising the writer. Rostropovich, who had taken some risk in inviting Solzhenitsyn to live at his dacha near Moscow for several years, suffered official disfavor after his letter was published abroad.
Even greater risks were taken by the inmates of the Potma Labor camp. They smuggled out congratulations to Solzhenitsyn, expressing admiration for his "courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling of the human soul and the destruction of human values."
At the time, Solzhenitsyn's private life was in turmoil. As news of the prize was announced, his marriage was dissolving. Two years earlier he had met Natalia Svetlova, a mathematician who was involved in typing and circulating samizdat literature, and they became drawn to each other. As Solzhenitsyn explained, "She simply joined me in my struggle and we went side by side." He asked his wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, for a divorce. But she refused, and continued to do so for several years. At one point, shortly after he had won the prize, she attempted suicide, and he had to rush her to a hospital, where she was revived.
In the meantime, Natalia Svetlova gave birth to Yermolai and Ignat, Solzhenitsyn's two oldest sons. Finally, in March 1973, Natalia Reshetovskaya consented to a divorce. Soon afterward, Solzhenitsyn and Natalia Svetlova were married in an Orthodox church near Moscow.
His skirmishes with the state only intensified. While the authorities kept him from publishing, he kept writing and speaking out, eliciting threats by mail and phone. He slept with a pitchfork beside his bed. Finally, government agents who had tried to isolate and intimidate him arrested him, took him to the airport and deported him. Solzhenitsyn believed his stay in the United States would be temporary. "In a strange way, I not only hope, I am inwardly convinced that I shall go back," he told the BBC. "I live with that conviction. I mean my physical return, not just my books. And that contradicts all rationality."
With that goal, he lived like a recluse in rural Vermont, paying little attention to his surroundings as he kept writing about Russia, in Russian, with Russian readers in mind.
"He wrote, ate, and slept and that was about all," Remnick wrote in 1994 after visiting the Solzhenitsyn family in Cavendish. "For him to accept a telephone call was an event; he rarely left his 50 acres." In contrast to the rest of his family, he never became an American citizen.
His children -- a third son, Stepan, had been born six months before Solzhenitsyn was deported -- went to local schools, but they began their day with prayers in Russian for Russia's liberation, and their mother gave them Russian lessons. She also designed the pages and set the type for the 20 volumes of her husband's work that were being produced in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris. And she administered a fund to help political prisoners and their families. Solzhenitsyn had donated to the fund all royalties from "The Gulag Archipelago," by far his best-selling book.
As for the author, he would head each morning for the writing house, a wing the Solzhenitsyns had added to the property. There he devoted himself to a gigantic work of historical fiction that eventually ran to more than 5,000 pages in four volumes. The work, called "The Red Wheel," focused on the revolutionary chaos that had spawned Bolshevism and set the stage for modern Russian history. It has been compared, at least in it's sweep and intentions, with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
Solzhenitsyn started work on the first volume, "August 1914," in 1969, though he said he had begun thinking about the project before World War II, when he was a student in Rostov. "August 1914" was spirited out of the Soviet Union and published in Paris before Solzhenitsyn's expulsion.
He believed that his account, which challenged Soviet dogma about the founding period, was as iconoclastic as his earlier writings about the gulag.
In the United States, "August 1914" reached No. 2 on best-seller lists, but the subsequent volumes, "November 1916," "March 1917," and "April 1917," all completed in Cavendish, have not been widely bought or read.
Solzhenitsyn was displeased by the Russian reaction to "The Red Wheel," which he spoke of as the centerpiece of his creative life. He expressed the hope that it would gain importance with time.
In Solzhenitsyn's 18 years in Vermont, he never warmed to Americans beyond his Cavendish neighbors. On the eve of his return to Russia in 1994, he acknowledged he had been aloof. "Instead of secluding myself here and writing 'The Red Wheel,' I suppose I could have spent time making myself likable to the West," he told Remnick. "The only problem is that I would have had to drop my way of life and my work."
But even when he stepped outside Cavendish, as he did when he addressed the Harvard graduates in 1978, his condemnations of American politics, press freedoms and social mores struck many as insensitive, haughty and snobbish.
There were those who described him as reactionary, as an unreconstructed Slavophile, a Russian nationalist, undemocratic and authoritarian. Olga Carlisle, a writer who had helped spirit the manuscript of "The Gulag Archipelago" out of Moscow but who was no longer speaking to Solzhenitsyn, wrote in Newsweek that the Harvard speech had been intended for a Russian audience, not an American one.
"His own convictions are deeply rooted in the Russian spirit, which is untempered by the civilizing influences of a democratic tradition," Carlisle said. And Czeslaw Milosz, generally admiring of his fellow Nobel laureate, wrote, "Like the Russian masses, he, we may assume, has strong authoritarian tendencies."
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, first landing in the Siberian northeast, in Magadan, the former heart of the Gulag. On arrival, he bent down to touch the soil in memory of the victims.
He flew on to Vladivostok, where he and his family began a two-month journey by private railroad car across Russia, to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. The BBC was on hand to film the entire passage and pay for it.
On the first of 17 stops, his judgment was already clear. His homeland, he said, was "tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition." As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened. And after settling into a new home on the edge of Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia.
In Vermont, he had never warmed to Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform policies of perestroika He thought they were the last-ditch tactics of a leader defending a system that Solzhenitsyn had long known to be doomed. For a while he was impressed by Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia's first freely elected leader, but then turned against him. Yeltsin, he said, had failed to defend the interests of ethnic Russians, who had become vulnerable foreign minorities in the newly independent countries that had so suddenly been sheared off from the Soviet Union. Later, he criticized the advent of Vladimir Putin as antidemocratic.
Russians initially greeted Solzhenitsyn with high hopes. On the eve of his return, a poll in St. Petersburg showed him to be the favorite choice for president. But he soon made it clear that he had no wish to take on a political role in influencing Russian society, and his reception soon turned tepid.
Few Russians were reading "The Red Wheel." The books were said to be too long for young readers.
Michael Specter, then The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, observed, "Leading intellectuals here consider his oratory hollow, his time past and his mission unclear."
Nationalists, who had once hoped for his blessing, were alienated by his rejection. Democratic reformers, who wanted his backing, were offended by his aloofness and criticism of them. Old Communists reviled him as they always had.
In October 1994, Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia's Parliament. His complaints and condemnations had not abated. "This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy," he declared. "Rule by the few." He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause.
Solzhenitsyn started appearing on television twice a week as the host of a 15-minute show called "A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn." Most times he veered into condemnatory monologues that left his less outspoken guests with little to do but look on. Alessandra Stanley, writing about the program for The Times, said Solzhenitsyn came across "as a combination of Charlie Rose and Moses." After receiving poor ratings, the program was canceled a year after it was started.
As the century turned, Solzhenitsyn continued to write. In a 2001 book, he confronted the relationship of Russians and Jews, a subject that some critics had long contended he had ignored or belittled in his fiction. A few accused him of anti-Semitism. Irving Howe, the literary critic, did not go that far but maintained that in "August 1914," Solzhenitsyn was dismissive of Jewish concerns and gave insufficient weight to pogroms and other persecution of the Jews. Others noted that none of the prisoners in "Ivan Denisovich" were definitively identified as a Jew, and the one whose Jewish identity was subtly hinted at was the one who had the most privileges and was protected from the greatest rigors.
Remnick defended Solzhenitsyn, saying he "in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish; Natalia's mother is Jewish, and not a few of his friends are, too."
In the final years of his life,, Solzhenitsyn had spoken approvingly of a "restoration" of Russia under Vladimir Putin, and was criticized in some quarters as increasingly nationalist.
In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn said that Russians' view of the West as a "knight of democracy" had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called "a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals." He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy "is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet."
In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin -- after refusing, on principle, similar prizes from Gorbachev and from Yeltsin. Putin, he said in the Der Spiegel interview, "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible -- a slow and gradual restoration."
SOURCE: Wikipedia, 2020-05-04
18,000,000 people passed through the Gulag's campsWikipedia
(As of March 1940) There were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labour colonies in the Soviet Union.
1,600,000 died due to detention in the camps (though some disputed estimates range from over 2.7 to 6 million; 1.6 million is generally the consensus in contemporary Soviet historiography)
The Gulag (Russian: ГУЛаг), acronym of Main Administration of Camps, Russian: Главное управление лагерей) was the government agency which was in charge of the Soviet network of forced-labour camps which was set up by order of Vladimir Lenin. It reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag to refer to all forced-labour camps which existed in the Soviet Union, including camps which existed in the post-Stalin era. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as by NKVD troikas or by other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognised as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.
The agency was first administered by the GPU, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The Solovki prison camp, the first corrective labor camp constructed after the revolution, was established in 1918 and legalised by a decree "On the creation of the forced-labour camps" on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. According to Nicolas Werth, author of The Black Book of Communism, the yearly mortality rate in the Soviet concentration camps strongly varied, reaching 5% (1933) and 20% (1942-1943) while dropping considerably in the post-war years (about 1 to 3% per year at the beginning of the 1950s). The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or as a result of their detention. However, some historians question the reliability of such data and instead rely heavily on literary sources that come to higher estimations. Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands", and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labour colonies in the Soviet Union. Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern and eastern Russia and in Kazakhstan such as Karaganda, Norilsk, Vorkuta and Magadan, were originally blocks of camps built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago" was not the first literary work about labour camps. His previous book on the subject, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", about a typical day in the life of a Gulag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, Novy Mir (New World), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. "The First Circle", an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the Marfino sharashka or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968. [Source: Wikipedia]
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича | Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day in the life of ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, since never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed. Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote a short introduction for the issue entitled "Instead of a Foreword" to prepare the journal's readers for what they were about to experience.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to a camp in the Soviet gulag system. He was accused of becoming a spy after being captured briefly by the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. He is innocent, but is sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp.
The day begins with Shukhov waking up sick. For waking late, he is forced to clean the guardhouse, but this is a comparatively minor punishment. When Shukhov is finally able to leave the guardhouse, he goes to the dispensary to report his illness. It is relatively late in the morning by this time, however, so the orderly is unable to exempt any more workers and Shukhov must work.
The rest of the novel deals mainly with Shukhov's squad (the 104th, which has 24 members), their allegiance to the squad leader, and the work that the prisoners (zeks) do in hopes of getting extra food for their performance. For example, they are seen working at a brutal construction site where the cold freezes the mortar used for bricklaying if not applied quickly enough. Solzhenitsyn also details the methods used by the prisoners to survive; the whole camp lives by the rule of survival of the fittest.
Tiurin, the foreman of gang 104, is strict but kind, and the squad's fondness of Tiurin becomes more evident as the book progresses. Though a morose man, Tiurin is liked because he understands the prisoners, he talks to them, and he helps them. Shukhov is one of the hardest workers in the squad, possessing versatile skills that are in great demand, and he is generally well-respected. Rations are meagre at the camp -- given to the prisoners on the basis of how productive their work units are (or the authorities think they have been) -- but they are one of the few things that Shukhov lives for. He conserves the food that he receives and is always watchful for any item that he can hide and trade for food at a later date, or for favors and services he can do prisoners that they will thank him for in small gifts of food.
At the end of the day, Shukhov is able to provide a few special services for Tsezar (Caesar), an intellectual who does office work instead of manual labor. Tsezar is most notable, however, for receiving packages of food from his family. Shukhov is able to get a small share of Tsezar's packages by standing in lines for him. Shukhov reflects on his day, which was both productive and fortuitous for him. He did not get sick, his group had been assigned well paid work, he had filched a second ration of food at lunch, and he had smuggled into camp a small piece of metal he would fashion into a useful tool.
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 1963-01-22
Two or three weeks ago Leonid F. Illyiehev, the Soviet propaganda boss, made a rather plaintive speech to the young writers of Moscow. Please, he said, in effect, there are other subjects besides "the camps" to write about.
Suddenly, in Moscow, it would appear, everyone wants to write about life in the Stalin concentration camps. The reason for this is a rather short, sparsely told, eloquent, explosive, work by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which today reaches the American public in English translation.
Solzhenitsyn is a 44-year-old mathematics teacher in the old Russian town of Ryazan who spent eight years in Stalinís concentration camps. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is his first literary work, the simple story of one day in a Soviet concentration camp.
There is hardly a detail in Solzhenitsyn's story which, in itself is new. The cruelty, the falseness of the charges, the animal fight for survival, the debasement, the cynical grafting, the brutalizing, the sentences stretching into infinity (or death), the hunger, the suffering, the cold -- all this is familiar.
But the same might have been said of conditions in Russian prisons before Dostoyevsky wrote his "Notes, from the House of the Dead." The story of political prisoners in Siberia was well known before George Kennan wrote his famous "Siberia and the Exile System" in 1891.
Yet, each of these works changed our perception of the known facts. So it is with Solzhenitsyn's remarkable tale. In the Soviet Union, of course, it has been a sensation. Until the November issue of the literary journal, Novy Mir, appeared with Solzhenitsyn's story, no Soviet writer had tackled this most terrible and characteristic feature of the Stalin era. (It took Premier Khrushchev's personal okay to get the story published.) Small wonder that all 95,000 copies of Novy Mir vanished almost before they hit the newsstands and that they now sell for $10 a copy.
Solzhenitsyn has written no mere propagandistic expose. He has created a small, almost flawless classic employing the eloquence of reticence and understatement in a manner which even the fumbling of hurried translation cannot obscure.
Ivan Denisovich Shukov, his central figure, is a simple peasant. His "crime" was to escape from the Germans who took him prisoner in 1943 and return to his own lines. Had he not said he had been in German hands he would have gotten a medal. By telling the truth he was sentenced to a concentration camp as a "spy." Had he not confessed being a "spy" he would have been shot. Neither he nor his NKVD interrogator had ingenuity enough to figure out what kind of "spying" he was supposed to do.
Now in a prison camp resembling one of the Karanga camps where Solzhenitsyn himself was confined, Ivan strives to keep alive in a milieu-ruled, as an old inmate says, "by the law of the taiga," or as we would put it, the law of the jungle.
Who are the other prisoners? One is a Soviet Navy captain. His misfortune was that a British admiral sent him a Christmas present. One man is a Baptist. His crime? Being a Baptist. A youngster took a pail of milk to some Ukrainian outlaws -- and drew a 25-year sentence. In every labor gang of 20 to 30 men there are at least five or six "spies." There is even one "genuine spy" in the camp, a Moldavian who actually worked for the Germans. One man was drummed out of the Red Army as the son of a kulak or rich peasant. Later, the officers who drummed him out were shot in the purge.
Everyone cheats. Everyone steals. But there are rules of the game. Only by observing the rules with skill can a man hope to survive. If he fights back like the Naval captain he'll be thrown into the sub-zero guardhouse for 10 days. If he survives his health is ruined. Not more than a year or two of life will remain.
Surviving Is a Triumph
It is not an easy world for Americans to comprehend. As Ivan muses: "How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?" It is a world in which to live through one more day is an achievement. When Shukov has gone through his day he falls asleep in a glow of contentment. It has been a lucky day. He has not been put into the punishment cells. He has not been sent to the open steppe to work in the 20-below zero wind. He's gotten an extra bowl of mush for supper. He's worked at building a wall and gotten pleasure from it. Heís gotten a hacksaw blade into camp without being caught. Heís bought some good tobacco. And he hasn't gotten sick. And the book closes:
"A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. ...
"Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.
"The three extra days were for leap years."
This quiet tale has struck a powerful blow against the return of the horrors of the Stalin system. For Solzhenitsyn's words burn like acid.
Of the two translations neither comes close to reproducing the rough vigor of the author's concentration camp slang. Each has been done with too much haste. Each relies on standard four-letter words rather than the author's salty idiom. However, Ralph Parker's version in the Dutton edition is superior to the patchwork thrown together by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley for Praeger. The most striking blooper of the Hayward- Hingley translation is to put in the mouths of the prisoners the phrase "Comrade Warder." The prisoners were forbidden, as Solzhenitsyn notes, to call the guards "comrade," which is the customary Soviet greeting. They had to address the guards as "Citizen," removing their hats five paces away and keeping it off two paces beyond the guard.
SOURCE: Wikipedia, 2020-05-06 | Plot Summary
Cancer Ward (Russian: Ра́ковый ко́рпус, Rákovy kórpus) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Completed in 1966, the novel was distributed in Russia that year in samizdat, and banned there the following year. In 1968, several European publishers published it in Russian, and in April 1968 excerpts in English appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK without Solzhenitsyn's permission. An unauthorized English translation was published that year, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.
Cancer Ward tells the story of a small group of patients in Ward 13, the cancer ward of a hospital in Soviet Central Asia in 1955, two years after Joseph Stalin's death. A range of characters are depicted, including those who benefited from Stalinism, resisted or acquiesced. Like Solzhenitsyn, the main character, the Russian Oleg Kostoglotov, spent time in a labour camp as a "counter-revolutionary" before being exiled to Central Asia under Article 58.
The story explores the moral responsibility of those implicated in Stalin's Great Purge (1936-1938), when millions were killed, sent to camps or exiled. One patient worries that a man he helped to jail will seek revenge, while others fear that their failure to resist renders them as guilty as any other. "You haven't had to do much lying, do you understand? ..." one patient tells Kostoglotov. "You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to 'expose' you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts ... And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad, demand it!"
Toward the end of the novel, Kostoglotov realizes that the damage done was too great, that there will be no healing now that Stalin has gone. As with cancer, there may be periods of remission but no escape. On the day of his release from the hospital, he visits a zoo, seeing in the animals people he knew: "Deprived of their home surroundings, they had lost the idea of rational freedom. It would only make things harder for them, suddenly to set them free."
Like much of Solzhenitsyn's work, the timescale of the novel is brief -- a few weeks in the spring of 1955. This places the action after the death of Stalin and the fall of secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, but before Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech" denouncing aspects of Stalinism, one of the heights of the post-Stalin "thaw" in the USSR. A purge of the Supreme Court and the fall of the senior Stalinist Georgy Malenkov take place during the time of the novel's action.
The plot focuses on a group of patients as they undergo crude and frightening treatment in a squalid hospital. Writer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers writes that the novel is the "most complete and accurate fictional account of the nature of disease and its relation to love. It describes the characteristics of cancer; the physical, psychological, and moral effects on the victim; the conditions of the hospital; the relations of patients and doctors; the terrifying treatments; the possibility of death." Kostoglotov's central question is what life is worth, and how we know when we have paid too much for it.
The novel is partly autobiographical. Kostoglotov is admitted to hospital for cancer treatment from internal perpetual exile in Kazakhstan, as was Solzhenitsyn. In a chapter called "The Root From Issyk-Kul," Kostoglotov's doctor discovers a vial of dark fluid in his bedside table, prompting Kostoglotov to explain that it's an extract of a root used by natural healers in Russia to cure cancer. Solzhenitsyn himself ingested the same root extract before his cancer went into remission. Kostoglotov is depicted as having been born in Leningrad, whereas Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk.
Bureaucracy and the nature of power in Stalin's state are represented by Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a "personnel officer," bully and informer. The corrupt power of Stalin's regime is shown through his dual desires to be a "worker" but also achieve a "special pension." He is discomfited by signs of a political thaw, and fears that a rehabilitated man he denounced 18 years ago (to obtain the whole apartment they were sharing) will seek revenge. He praises his arrogant daughter, but severely criticizes his son for showing stirrings of humanity. When he is discharged he believes he is cured, but the staff privately give him less than a year to live; his cancer cannot be rooted out any more than the corruption of the 'apparatchik' class to which he belongs. At the end, Rusanov's wife drops rubbish from her car window, symbolising the carelessness with which the regime treated the country.
Some local landmarks are mentioned in the novel, such as the trolleyline and Chorsu Bazaar. The zoo Kostoglotov visits is now a soccer field near Mirabad Amusement Park.
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 1968-10-27
The union of a great artist and a great theme constitutes, as Kierkegaard observed, "the fortunate in the historical process, the divine conjunction of its forces, the high tide of historic time."
Thus the union of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the theme of the concentration camp has produced one of the masterworks of 20th-century fiction. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." "One Day," and "The First Circle" as well, achieve what Camus deemed impossible: they compel the human imagination to participate in the agony and murder of millions that have been the distinguishing feature of our age. Such a task could only have been accomplished by literature, performing here what may be, after the historical cataclysm of Stalinism and Nazism, its highest cathartic function.
The latest Solzhenitsyn novel to appear in America, "The Cancer Ward," engages another theme which, like prison, the author has witnessed and endured. Once again he guides us into the enclosed world of the condemned and, at his relentless touch, forces us into an awareness of man in extremis. But there is a difference between the theme of the concentration camp and the theme of the cancer ward which makes the first cry out for a Solzhenitsyn, and the second pass him by. It is obvious enough: the camp is man-made, gratuitous and absolutely modern. Disease is God-given, unavoidable, and eternal. "Where can I read about us?" asks one of Solzhenitsyn's characters, an ex-prisoner who despises contemporary literature. "Will it only be a hundred years from now?"
With "One Day," published in Russia in 1962, Solzhenitsyn offered millions of Russians the chance at last to read about themselves, in the story of the innocent carpenter, Ivan Denisovich, who is subjected to the most painful and degrading experience imaginable, without knowing. In "The First Circle," which has been banned in Russia, Solzhenitsyn explored the anatomy of Stalinism, in exhaustive detail, showing how it destroys human relations, warps the mind and deforms the spirit. Clearly Solzhenitsyn believes in the power of literature to exorcise Stalinism. Vain as this hope may be, it has inextricably bound a great writer to his great, and perhaps his only subject.
Solzhenitsyn has applied the same method to the subject of "Cancer Ward." Here he examines, with clinical precision, the nature of the physical disease and the process whereby the patient, like the prisoner -- "stripped of his outer bark and ready to be planed"--is revealed to himself, and sometimes transformed by the confrontation with death. A great theme, no doubt, but familiar; it does not meet the same terrible, imperative need to know as did Solzhenitsyn's earlier novels. Tolstoy has shown us, perhaps once and for all, how a man may be reduced to his essence by disease in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," which is evidently the model for "Cancer Ward." As subject and symbol in modern fiction, disease requires perhaps a more sophisticated and ambiguous writer than Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn insists that his novel is simply about cancer. At a meeting of the Secretariat of the Union of Writers on Sept. 22, 1967, four months before Konstantin Fedin, the head of the Union, banned "The Cancer Ward," Solzhenitsyn replied to his critics who had accused him of writing a symbolic novel. "There are too many medical details for it to be a symbol," he said.
"I have given my novel to important cancer specialists asking their opinion. They replied that from the medical point of view it is unchalleangeable and up-to-date. It is about cancer, cancer as such, not as it is written about in literature devised to entertain people, but as it is experienced every day by the sick."
Solzhenitsyn must, of course, be taken seriously here. As a medical novel, "The Cancer Ward" offers a fair and quite interesting picture of medicine as practiced in a Central Asian city in 1955. The author himself was cast up in Tashkent, sick with cancer, at about the same period, after spending eight years in prisons and camps. Still in exile -- he was not "rehabilitated" until 1957-- he entered a hospital where his cancer, never clearly diagnosed as malignant, was arrested. As Solzhenitsyn is the ultimate realist writer, whose life story is indistinguishable from his fiction, it can be assumed that the cancer ward he describes is much as he observed it.
In spite of Solzhenitsyn's clinical preoccupations, the reader must strain hard to read this novel as a book about cancer. What are we to make of this question posed by the author: "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?" Again and again Solzhenitsyn is compelled to return, perhaps despite himself, to his great theme. Who are his cancer-ridden patients? Exiles, an ex-prisoner, a concentration-camp guard, and a secret- police bureaucrat whose denunciations have sent dozens of people to prison. As "One Day" stands for the agony of all Russia under Stalin, so "The Cancer Ward" irresistibly conveys an image of the immediate post-Stalin period when both victims and executioners were confined, all equally mutilated, in the cancer ward of the nation.
How fatal this mutilation may be is suggested in the conversation between ex-prisoner Kostoglotov and Shulubin, who is going to his death on the operating table. Here Shulubin raises the question which lies at the center of all Solzhenitsyn's work: the moral responsibility of countless Russians for the imprisonment of millions of innocent people. Shulubin envies Kostoglotov for having been in a camp. "At least you lied less, do you understand. At least you changed less. . . You were jailed. But we were forced to stand and applaud the sentences that had been pronounced. Not just to applaud, but to demand execution, to demand it."
Shulubin is enraged by the notion that anyone wholly believed in Stalinism. "Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turned out to be saboteurs -- and they believed it? . . .Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades -- and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people -- and they believed it?. . .Surely the whole nation can't consist of fools. . .When history pauses to ask about each of us: Who was he? the only answer will be one of the alternatives that Pushkin offered in his verse.
In this, our age of infamy
Man's choice is but to be
A tyrant, traitor, prisoner:
No other choice has he."
Even as the immense concentration camp system begins to be liquidated after Stalin's death, and mass terror subsides, new fears possess the Soviet citizen in the cancer ward. For the secret- police bureaucrat, it is fear of retribution by the innocent men he has denounced, some of whom are now returning from camps. For the ex-prisoner, the new fear is of freedom itself. In a splendid passage at the end of the novel, Oleg Kostoglotov, released from the cancer ward, and looking forward to the end of the "eternal exile" to which he had been condemned, visits the Tashkent zoo during his first hours of liberty: "The monkeys, all looking as if they had close prison haircuts, sad, occupied with primitive joys and sorrows on their board bunks, reminded him so strongly of his former acquaintances that he almost recognized some of them -- men still serving their terms somewhere. . . .The most profound thing about the confinement of these beasts was that Oleg, taking their side, could not have released them, even if he'd had the power, to break open their cages, because they had lost, together with their homelands, the idea of real freedom. The result of their sudden liberation could only be more terrible."
In such passages, Solzhenitsyn wholly meets the expectations aroused by his two earlier novels, and by his superb story "Matreyona's Home." But some of the faults that began to be apparent in "The First Circle" -- a lack of measure, and, sometimes, of control over the material and a penchant for simplistic moralizing -- are accentuated in "The Cancer Ward." Both "The Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" badly need cutting. Solzhenitsyn rewrote "One Day" three times until he achieved the supreme spareness which has been rivaled in modern fiction only by Babel and Camus.
This reviewer finished "The Cancer Ward" with mixed and turbulent feelings. On the one hand I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to read a work that, in spite of its weaknesses, towers about the novels that glut our marketplace. On the other, I am sickened by the knowledge that it cannot be read in Russia and that the publication of this book, like that of "The First Circle," ignores the author's own urgently expressed prohibition. Solzhenitsyn has several times spoken of the "danger" of the appearance of his banned books abroad, and charged that the Soviet secret police has circulated them in order to incriminate him. In his most recent statement about "The Cancer Ward" Solzhenitsyn declared last April 21 that no foreign publishers had obtained the manuscript, or authorization to publish it, from him. He expressed concern that the translations would be spoiled because of haste in the competitive scramble to publish his book. "But beyond money," he said, "there is literature."
It should be noted, however, in connection with this first publication in America by the Dial Press, that several editions of the novel have already appeared in Europe; it may be argued that one more edition will not substantially increase the danger to Solzhenitsyn, especially when, as is the case here, no claim is made to authorization." Be that as it may, Solzhenitsyn's apprehensions about the translations of the novel have been, in this instance, unfounded. Rebecca Frank's rendering is first-rate, nearly always imaginatively responsive to the author's use of out-of-the-way words, and to his abrupt shifts of tone and diction.
SOURCE: Wikipedia, 2020-05-06 | Plot Summary
In the First Circle (Russian: В кру́ге пе́рвом, V krúge pérvom; also published as The First Circle) is a novel by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, released in 1968. A more complete version of the book was published in English in 2009.
The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a research and development bureau made of gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks) are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following the Second World War. Unlike inhabitants of other gulag labor camps, the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoyed good working conditions; however, if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly shipped to Siberia.
The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle, or limbo of Hell in The Divine Comedy, wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other virtuous pagans, 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.
Innokentii Volodin, a diplomat, makes a telephone call he feels obliged by conscience to make, even though he knows he could be arrested. His call is taped and the NKVD seek to identify who has made the call.
The sharashka prisoners, or zeks, work on technical projects to assist state security agencies and generally pander to Stalin's increasing paranoia. While most are aware of how much better off they are than "regular" gulag prisoners (some of them having come from gulags themselves), some are also conscious of the overwhelming moral dilemma of working to aid a system that is the cause of so much suffering. As Lev Rubin is given the task of identifying the voice in the recorded phone call, he examines printed spectrographs of the voice and compares them with recordings of Volodin and five other suspects. He narrows it down to Volodin and one other suspect, both of whom are arrested.
By the end of the book, several zeks, including Gleb Nerzhin, the autobiographical hero, choose to stop co-operating, even though their choice means being sent to much harsher camps.
Volodin, initially crushed by the ordeal of his arrest, begins to find encouragement at the end of his first night in prison.
The book also briefly depicts several Soviet leaders of the period, including Stalin himself, who is depicted as vain and vengeful, remembering with pleasure the torture of a rival, dreaming of one day becoming emperor of the world, or listening to his subordinate Viktor Abakumov and wondering: "...has the day come to shoot him yet?"
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 1968-09-15
The concept of the world as a prison comes naturally to a Russian -- his world is a prison. So it was under the Czars. So it quickly became a gain in the flabby white hands of the paranoid Josef Stalin. A penal society throws into dramatic relief the basic human condition: the trivial becomes tragic; the absurd becomes profound; weakness becomes strength and unreasoned faith gives life its only logic.
This is the subject of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," and it is this which gives the work an epic quality. But it is Solzhenitsyn's camera eye, his absolute sense of pitch, his Tolstoyan power of characterization, his deep humaneness, his almost military discipline and Greek feeling for the unities which (let us say it at once) make his work a classic.
Solzhenitsyn sets his story in a few fleeting hours -- a little less than five days from Dec. 24 to Dec. 28, 1949. The scene is a special prison "institute" in Moscow. The characters are the prisoners, their guards, the directors of the Institute, the high officials of the Police Ministry, Stalin himself in an unforgettable portrait, three or four magnificent Russian women, a few simple peasants, several pallid bureaucrats.
The plot is almost unimportant (although the story of the Institute's crash program to invent a voice scrambler and voice-identification technique is filled with dramatic suspense), because we know as soon as we begin to read that all are doomed -- the brilliant mathematician (who seals his fate by destroying the work which would have given him freedom); the police "Institute Director" who knows instinctively that he will soon be placed behind his own bars; the pathetic young woman who finds her only love with a brash youngster whose braggadocio assures his death; the dilettante diplomat who fears (correctly) that his only act of decency has condemned him to destruction; and, of course, Stalin, beset with fear, premonitions of treachery and death, alone, morbid, weary, beginning his descent into the final years of madness.
The young Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko said last summer of Solzhenitsyn: "He is our only living classic." Yevtushenko was right. When comparisons of Solzhenitsyn are made with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev this is not hyperbole. He is, curiously, a major 19th century novelist suddenly appearing in the last half of the 20th century. No nouvelle vague tendencies here; no sign of blurred technique, soft focus, existentialist philosophy. Just hard-edged prose, honed Toledo sharp, a sureness of colloquial language and an implicit accuracy of scene which has its links with Hugo, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Zola.
If the question arises, as inevitably it does, as to how we must compare Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, the answer is simple. Pasternak was a great poet perhaps Russia's greatest in this century. "Doctor Zhivago" was a poet's complex, image-ridden fantasy of his country under the rule of the Bolshevik's. Solzhenitsyn is no fantasist. He tells is like it is. The penal society of which he writes is Russia, not some Orwellian concept. It is Russia, here and now; as it was yesterday and last month and for a hundred years before that.
The problem of presenting Solzhenitsyn to the American audience (as it was of Pasternak before him) is to distinguish between Solzhenitsyn the literary genius and Solzhenitsyn the center of politico-literary controversy, the target of repression and censorship, hero of the fight against a return to Stalinism.
And the problem of discussing "The First Circle" is to disentangle the journalistic from the literary. Like his earlier work and more slender work, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" "The First Circle" is an astounding piece of political journalism as well as a literary work of art. It is the modern counterpart of Dostoevksy's memoirs from "The House of the Dead." Dostoevsky's work was written after five years in Czarist prisons and five more years in Siberian exile. It brought to the Russia of his day the first sensitive report of the world-within-a- world which was the Czarist penal system. No literate Russian could forget after reading "The House of the Dead" that, as Dostoevsky said: "The very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habits. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed. The man and the citizen is lost forever in the tyrant."
But it is a lesson which Russia, and we along with the Russians, must learn over and over again. In the Soviet period we have had an endless succession of prison camp revelations. The horrors have been stated and restated almost to ennui.
Now, however, the towering figure of Solzhenitsyn appears. He, like Dostoevsky, is a survivor. He, too, spent years in prison and exile; and when he writes of that society-within-a-society it is as though we had never before experienced it. In his work, terror is so workaday, brutality so banal, that we know every line he writes is true; we know that each of the dozens of stories he weaves together like the bright strands of a Bokhara rug is a real story; that each man and each woman are real men and women -- indeed, in Moscow, amazing as it may seem, not a few of Solzhenitsyn's characters are alive today, survivors like him of "The First Circle" of hell.
The spirits who inhabited Dante's First Circle had committed no sins and this, in essence, is true of those who inhabit Solzhenitsyn's First Circle. As in Dante, this Circle stands on the edge of the eternal abyss, and descent is easy, frequent and almost inevitable. But Solzhenitsyn deals not with the spirits of the past. His men and women are flesh and blood; they love; they hate; they laugh; they cry; they gossip; they dream. All of their dreams are impossible.
And suddenly we understand that prison, terror, corruptibility, and sadism refine and purify the human ethos. It is not in the end the prisoners who are destroyed, even though they may lose their lives. It is the jailers, the army of jailers which Stalin created and which flourished until, quite literally, one-third or one-half of Russia called a "sharashkaya fabrika," or a "factory of black deeds."
Before Stalin finished, he managed to organize his whole country on that principle. But it did not work. He was not able to stifle the human spirit. This is the optimistic message of Solzhenitsyn. Tyrants have been trying to crush the Russian dedication to humane ideals for so many years that it is hard to know when the effort first began. They have not succeeded. Solzhenitsyn is testimony to their failure. At a time when dark clouds lie on the horizon and strident forces clash over America's future, this is a lesson to give us heart.
SOURCE: Wikipedia, 2020-05-04
"The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation" (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) is a three-volume, non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, followed by an English translation the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Communist Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner. In Russian, the term GULAG (ГУЛАГ) is an acronym for Main Directorate of Camps (Главное управление лагерей).
Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, "The Gulag Archipelago" has been officially published in Russia.
SOURCE: NYTimes.com, 1974-06-16
Most books about the experience of holocaust, especially those written by survivors, have two purposes. One is to chronicle the full horror of the holocaust, to sear it into the collective consciousness, so that it may never recur. The other is to explain the historical origins and causes of that experience.
"The Gulag Archipelago" is a non‐fictional account from and about the other great holocaust of our century -- the imprisonment, brutalization and very often murder of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens by their own Government, mostly during Stalin's rule from 1929 to 1953.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has called "The Gulag Archipelago" his "main" work, Setting it above the major novels that won him the reputation of Russia's pre‐eminent living writer and the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. The importance he attaches to the book, written in 1958-68 but authorized for Western publication only after the Soviet secret police seized a copy of the manuscript last August, is understandable.
Solzhenitsyn's first purpose has been to document for the Soviet people, whose Government has acknowledged only part of the truth and almost none of the responsibility, the full dimensions of what happened. A survivor himself, Solzhenitsyn feels a messianic obligation to "all those tortured and murdered," but even more to living and future generations. He wants the whole truth of official criminality and civic acquiescence openly acknowledged and condemned so that the nation can achieve spiritual and political renewal through "the great Russian tradition of penitence." As a chronicle of the holocaust, "The Gulag Archipelago" is an extraordinary achievement. As historical explanation, it is less successful.
Solzhenitsyn has recreated the history between 1918 and 1956 of "that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent -- an almost invisible, almost imperceptible, country inhabited by the zek people [prisoners]." Archipelago refers to the far‐flung system of forced labor camps run and augmented by the secret police and its institutions, whose prisoner population grew from small numbers after the revolution of 1917 to 12 to 15 million (about half "politico's") at any one time by the 1940's. Gulag is the acronym of the central office that administered the penal camps.
Solzhenitsyn's reconstruction of this secret "country" within the country, is itself a heroic accomplishment under Soviet conditions. The main sources are his own prison experiences from 1945 to 1953 and those related to him by 227 other survivors. Their testimonies are supplemented by information from official, samizdat, and even several Western publications. They are assembled in a powerful narrative which combines the prose styles of, epic novelist, partisan historian and outraged moralist, interspersed with Russian proverbs, black humor, prison camp language and parodies of Soviet bureaucratese. The sardonically polemical tone throughout the book suits Solzhenitsyn's subject and anger.
This volume of "The Gulag Archipelago," containing only two of seven projected parts, is structured loosely as a journey to the "thousands of islands of the spellbound Archipelago." The reader follows scores of victims, their biographies effectively generalized, from arrest to first cell and "interrogation," then onward through transit prisons, across the vast country in overcrowded, pestilent trains, to the ports and ships of the Archipelago. It is a journey into debasement and death, into grotesque torture, execution, rape, starvation, thirst, disease and more. Reduced to "a caricature of humanity," millions somehow survived the journey; other millions did not. The journey and book end upon arrival at the forced labor camps. Solzhenitsyn presumably will describe life and death there in subsequent volumes. Here he remarks only, "In it will be ... worse."
Solzhenitsyn's exposé should surprise no educated Western reader. General and specific aspects of the atrocity have long been known. Yet even for specialists there is a plethora of new detail, some more terrible, some ridiculous. Policemen search and dump the tiny coffin containing an arrested man's infant child. A woman interrogator threatens to arrest a prisoner's daughter and "lock her in a cell with syphilitics." A prisoner protesting that his alleged crime occurred when he was only 10 years old is warned not to "slander the Soviet intelligence service."
Not all of Solzhenitsyn's information about larger political affairs can be taken at face‐value. It seems unlikely, for example, that 200,000 Leningraders yvere arrested in 1934-35 alone, though the number may have been reached over a longer period. The tale of Stalin's plan to unleash a great pogrom in the early 1950's by publicly hanging several Jewish doctors in Red Square, however compatible with the dictator's personality, is based only on "rumors." These are minor points, though, and do not diminish the truthfulness of Solzhenitsyn's overall account.
Exposé, narrowly defined, is only part of this long and diverse book. Solzhenitsyn departs regularly from the prisoners' journey for substantial essays on the evolution, psychology and sociology of the Gulag country. To show that repression began with Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, not with Stalin, he carefully traces the development of the political police, penal institutions, criminal code and political trials from 1918. He records the three main "waves" of arrests that populated "our sewage disposal system"-peasants swept in by collectivization in 1929-30, party and other officials by Stalin's purges of the late 1930's, entire minority nations and repatriated Soviet P.O.W.'s in 1944-46-but also many of the endless "brooks and rivulets . . . and just plain individually scooped‐up droplets" since the beginning. He explores the mentality and stratification of victims, and victimizers as well. As a result, the book transcends expose, becoming an authentic literary re‐creation of the "native life and customs of the Archipelago."
How is this destruction of millions of innocent lives to be explained? Solzhenitsyn utterly rejects the view that it was caused by an aberration in Soviet history in 1929-53 known as Stalinism (a term having no real meaning for him). He maintains that it derived from the original nature of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet political system -- that there was a "straight line" between the Lenin and Stalin eras -- and specifically from the Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The ideology's "spiritual baseness," its lack of "religious and moral principles," caused and justified the evildoing. This argument, scattered elliptically throughout "The Gulag Archipelago" is restated in Solzhepitsyn's "Letter to the Soviet Leaders"-a remarkable moral, philosophical, programmatic appeal sent secretly to the leadership in September, 1973 -"This ideology bears the entire responsibility for all the blood that has been shed."
Solzhenitsyn is certainly right that the police‐prison camp system dates back to the year following the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, and that no achievements of the Soviet period can justify the subsequent torment and murder of millions. Leaving aside the fact that Soviet "ideology" has undergone radical changes over the years, and that Solzhenitsyn essentially equates Marxism with Stalinism, his general explanation, which is very similar to that of most American scholars, is one‐dimensional and selective in its historical evidence.
The original Bolshevik terror of 1918-21, for example, although enhanced by ideology, did not stem primarily from it, but from the dynamics of a fierce civil war against counterrevolutionary White and foreign armies. Both sides resorted to atrocities, a reciprocity common to civil wars elsewhere. After the civil war and with the consolidation of N.E.P., the party's moderate, reconciliatory policies of the 1920's, terror largely disappeared until Stalin's forcible abolition of N.E.E. in 1929. Though he tries, Solzhenitsyn's evidence does not revise this picture of the Soviet 1920's or support his contention that "N.E.P. was merely a cynical deceit," which is essential to his view of a "straight line" between Bolshevism and Stalinism.
His indictment of the whole Bolshevik tradition produces other kinds of one-sidedness. Most Western historians would at least agree that Lenin's legacy was ambiguous. In "The Gulag Archipelago" Lenin appears only as an embryonic Stalin, inciting repression against malingerers and foes as "insects." Bukharin, whom Solzhenitsyn calls "the highest and brightest intelligence" among original Bolshevik leader; is nonetheless, or perhaps therefore, portrayed as sniveling and unprincipled before and during his arrest in 1937, though there is strong evidence he behaved very differently. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn suggests that virtually all of Stalin's millions of Communist victims, lacking "moral principles." behaved ignobly in prison, again contrary to much evidence.
Similarly, Solzhenitsyn's refusal to consider other partial explanations conflicts with some of his own evidence. He argues rightly, for example, that Soviet repression has been many thousandfold greater and is thus qualitatively different from Czarist repression. Yet his materials show that renascent Czarist traditions, as well as the historical passivity of the Russian people, abetted the catastrophe.
Despite the plain circumstance that capricious terrorizing of millions began and ended with Stalin's rule -- the autocrat's presence as an animating force appears in asides throughout "The Gulag Archipelago"-Solzhenitsyn attributes no special significance to his role or personality.
Finally, in powerful sections vivified by candid references to his own near recruitment into the secret police, and to personal callousness during his career as a Red Army captain, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates the old adage that power corrupts, thereby implying a more universalist element of the holocaust.
We can, in other words, honor and share Solzhenitsyn's moral condemnation of what happened without necessarily embracing his explanation. His personal conversion, in the Archipelago, from Marxism-Leninism to Russian Christian Orthodoxy led him to an absolute repudiation of his first faith (a familiar syndrome among Western ex‐Communists as well) and to the intensely religious, national, Slavophile outlook expressed in his "Letter."
In it he implores the Soviet leadership to disavow this "rubbishy ideology." It has killed, he argues, 66 million and bred cynicism and hypocrisy among the living now it is leading to a disastrous war with China as well as ecological catastrophe through unbridled economic and technological growth.
Critical of Western democracy and all notions of "eternal Progress," he believes Russia can save herself only by turning deeply inward, away from empire and foreign involvements, and backward toward a reconstruction inspired by ancient native values of communalism, the land and the Church. The existing government, he says, can lead toward this "salvation" if in addition, it adopts a truly benevolent authoritarianism that will let the people breathe, let them think and develop!"
Though profoundly Russian, Solzhenitsyn's outlook does not reflect the whole, or perhaps even a major part, of dissident thinking in the Soviet Union today. The spokesmen of Western‐style liberalism and democratic Marxism‐Leninism, Andre Sakharov and Roy Medvedev, respect him greatly, share some of his demands, and have protested his mistreatment. But they disagree with him on crucial questions about the past and the future. In particular, the anti‐Stalinist, oppositionist ideas of Medvedev and others derive from a very Meant historical perspective, one that views the great terror is a repulsive betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution and Marxist‐Leninist ideals. A new anthology of left‐wing documents edited by George Saunders, "Sainizdat Voices of the Soviet Opposition" (New York: Monad Press, 1974) gives evidence that this perspective is alive and vigorous.
It is clear, however, that Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Medvedev and other brave nonconformists are engaged in an essential dialogue about the country's future.. To this critical discussion the present Soviet leadership his nothing to contribute but censorship, selective repression and, in Solzhenitsyn's case, deportation. The implication of the situation is apparently the point of an anecdote now circulating in the Soviet Union:
A hundred years from now it is asked, "Who was Brezhnev?"
"Oh, he was some politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn."
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