Solzhenitsyn, Russia's Conscience, Linked Worlds
Newcastle Herald
Monday August 11, 2008
ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters.
For a short period between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his people and single-handedly challenging their autocratic government. Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But it was the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle that secured for him the role of conscience of the nation. Later, he showed unmatched physical and moral courage in writing and publishing The Gulag Archipelago, one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature.Born in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, Solzhenitsyn was a year younger than the Russian Revolution. Despite a hard period as the only child of a sick churchgoing mother (his father had died before his birth), he grew up a loyal communist and supporter of the Soviet regime. But it was his very devotion to revolutionary purity that was to prove his undoing. As an artillery captain during World War II, he wrote letters to a friend expressing barely disguised hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule and hoping for a return to socialist principles when the war was over. These letters were intercepted and Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the labour camps and three years' administrative exile. The shock of this arrest and the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow were to lead to some of the finest pages in The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1973-76). During his first few months in the camps, Solzhenitsyn almost died from starvation and overwork. These experiences were to form the core of the finest of Solzhenitsyn's longer novels, The First Circle (1969). Solzhenitsyn's release from exile and rise to world fame is inextricably linked with the name and policies of First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who encouraged the thaw after Stalin's death in 1953 and inaugurated a wide-ranging policy of de-Stalinisation. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and, though he was barred from travelling to Stockholm to receive it, this greatly strengthened his position vis-a-vis the government. . The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West provoked the Politburo to decree his immediate deportation, and after a sensational arrival by plane in West Germany in February 1974, he settled in Zurich for two years, then the US. From the moment of his deportation Solzhenitsyn averred that he would return to Russia, and he was right. He made a triumphal return in May 1994, travelling from Vladivostok to Moscow by train. By the 2000s, Solzhenitsyn had retired from public view, settling in a comfortable villa on the outskirts of Moscow. But despite his advancing years, he kept up a punishing work schedule and was rarely out of the news. In 2007 President Vladimir Putin visited Solzhenitsyn personally to award him a state prize. Survived by second wife Svetlova and their sons, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered in the short-term as the bard of the Gulag, but in the context of the ages, his works will be read so long as readers thirst for the truth about life on this planet. The Guardian
© 2008 Newcastle Herald