Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- 89 years old
- Male
- Born Dec 11, 1918
- Died Aug 03, 2008
- Kislovodsk, Russia
About
Nobel Laureate
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose chronicles of Soviet tyranny made him a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit, died Sunday. He was 89.
Stepan Solzhenitsyn said his father died of heart failure late Sunday at his home near Moscow.
Driven, principled, frequently arrogant, a bearded figure with the fierce visage of a prophet, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was regarded as one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century.
A member of the first generation to be raised entirely under communism, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had experienced in his life much of what he related in his books.
That he persevered through cancer, prison, labor camps, controversy and condemnation was a wonder to many, and his accounts riveted his countrymen.
Like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevski, the 19th century masters of Russian letters, his subject was thought to be the struggle between good and evil in the Russian soul. The line separating the two, he said, ran through every heart.
In "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" and "The Gulag Archipelago," his acknowledged masterpieces, and a vast outpouring of other works, he chronicled the sufferings of his countrymen and bore lasting witness to the fate of millions of otherwise forgotten victims of Soviet misrule. Literature, he declared in his Nobel lecture, "is the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation's bygone history.
"But woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force."
With "The Gulag Archipelago," he gave a name to the brutal network of labor camps that spread across the Soviet Union during dictator Josef Stalin's frenzied industrialization drive. Tens of millions of men, women and children died in the effort.
It shocked readers and helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Solzhenitsyn struggled against the Soviet leadership almost in the shadow of the Kremlin. In 1974, he was charged with treason and exiled to the West, where he received a hero's welcome, although his attacks on Western culture and politics drew detractors.
After leaving the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn lived in Zurich, then in Cavendish, Vt., where he spent what he described as some of his happiest years, working in peace in surroundings that reminded him of home.
In 1994, having completed "The Red Wheel," a massive series of historical novels on the Russian Revolution, he returned to his beloved Russia.
Received as a national treasure, he made a triumphant whistle-stop cross-country train trip. But in later television appearances he was viewed as gloomy and out of touch, and he retreated to his Moscow home.
During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply after the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn spent the last decade of his life in failing health and seclusion at his rural estate outside Moscow, editing his life's work for a 30-volume anthology that he predicted he would not live to see completed.
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My contacts with Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Frank Manheim Aug 27, 2009
The most interesting experience for this series of memories took place in the later 1980s, while Solzhenitsyn was living in Cavendish, Vermont. I was reading CANCER WARD, which was set in a cancer clinic in Uzbekistan around 1956, and was struck by research of the brilliant young geologist, Vadim. Suffering from incurable and probably fatal melanoblastoma, Vadim had developed revolutionary radiochemical tracer techniques for studying earth processes, finding ore deposits, etc. I was well acquainted with the history of geochemical tracers and prospecting through my work, and recognized that even in the 1960s, when Solzhenitsyn wrote his book, such techniques as Vadim was working with would have been very advanced.
Sceptical that I would receive and answer - given Solzhenitsyn's dedication to his work and probable heavy mailbag from his large circle of Russian frieknds and contacts - I nevertheless penned a letter to him. It was in both English and Russian and highlighted my main question. How did Solzhenitsyn come upon such advanced geochemical approaches that Vadim was working with?
To my great surprise I got an answer! Solzhenitsyn wrote back that he had needed advanced concepts to associate with Vadim. So he asked knowledgeable friends to make suggestions.
There is much more in this deceptively simple answer than may be obvious. First, as I mentioned, the techniques in question were cutting edge. There would only be a small group of experts in the Soviet Union who would be conversant enough to offer tsuch ideas. That Solzhenitsyn's circle of friends was broad enough to include people with scientific expertise is significant. Moreover, the specific suggestions were appropriate and judicious. This suggests that whatever their fields of work or specialization, Solzhenitsyn's friends tended to be people of the highest ability.
I think that my experience is consistent with other aspects of his career, namely that Solzhenitsyn wanted to know the truth, the true realities. The desire of the media or various experts to paste labels on 'Solzhenitsyn has been a constant. I remember when he arrived in Zurich after being expelled from the Soviet Union. One reporter asked him whether he advocated returning the Soviet Union to a more patriarchal Russian Orthodox system. Solzhenitsyn gave a simple and powerful response that abruptly derailed further questions along this line. He said
"I'm a historian. As a historian I know that one cannot move forward by turning backward."
In other words, every time I have heard Solzhenitsyn address assumptions about him or his aims, he has convincingly demonstrated that simplistic labels and characterizations were misplaced.
Moral Compass
Larry Herman Aug 04, 2008
My Memory
Diane Youmans Aug 04, 2008
Inspirational Writer
Hans Drake Aug 04, 2008