Soviet literature
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn.
Biography
SOLZHENITSYN, ALEXANDER ISAEVICH (1918 -2008), Russian writer.
Born on December 11 in Kislovodsk. The writer's paternal ancestors were peasants. Father, Isaac Semenovich, received a university education. From university to First world war volunteered to go to the front. Returning from the war, he was mortally wounded while hunting and died six months before the birth of his son.
Mother, Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak, came from the family of a wealthy Kuban landowner.
Solzhenitsyn lived his first years in Kislovodsk, and in 1924 he and his mother moved to Rostov-on-Don.
Already in his youth, Solzhenitsyn realized himself as a writer. In 1937, he conceived a historical novel about the beginning of the First World War and began collecting materials for its creation. Later, this plan was embodied in August the Fourteenth: the first part (“knot”) of the historical narrative The Red Wheel.
In 1941, Solzhenitsyn graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University. Even earlier, in 1939, he entered the extramural Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and Art. The war prevented him from finishing college. After studying at the artillery school in Kostroma in 1942, he was sent to the front and appointed commander of a sound reconnaissance battery.
Solzhenitsyn went through the military path from Orel to East Prussia, received the rank of captain, and was awarded orders. At the end of January 1945, he led the battery out of encirclement.
On February 9, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested: military censorship drew attention to his correspondence with his friend Nikolai Vitkevich. The letters contained harsh assessments of Stalin and the order he established, and spoke of the falsity of modern Soviet literature. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the camps and eternal exile. He served time in New Jerusalem near Moscow, then at the construction of a residential building in Moscow. Then - in the “sharashka” (a secret research institute where prisoners worked) in the village of Marfino near Moscow. He spent 1950−1953 in a camp (in Kazakhstan) and was involved in general camp work.
After the end of his prison term (February 1953), Solzhenitsyn was sent into indefinite exile. He began teaching mathematics in the regional center of Kok-Terek, Dzhambul region of Kazakhstan. February 3, 1956 Supreme Court Soviet Union freed Solzhenitsyn from exile, and a year later declared him and Vitkevich completely innocent: criticism of Stalin and literary works was recognized as fair and not contrary to socialist ideology.
In 1956, Solzhenitsyn moved to Russia - to a small village in the Ryazan region, where he worked as a teacher. A year later he moved to Ryazan.
While still in the camp, Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer, and on February 12, 1952 he underwent surgery. During his exile, Solzhenitsyn was treated twice at the Tashkent Oncology Center and used various medicinal plants. Contrary to doctors' expectations, the malignant tumor disappeared. In his healing, a recent prisoner saw a manifestation of the Divine will - a command to tell the world about Soviet prisons and camps, to reveal the truth to those who know nothing about it or do not want to know.
Solzhenitsyn wrote his first surviving works in the camp. These are poems and a satirical play Feast of the Winners.
In the winter of 1950−1951, Solzhenitsyn conceived a story about one day in prison. In 1959, the story Shch-854 (One Day of One Prisoner) was written. Shch-854 is the camp number of the main character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner (zek) in a Soviet concentration camp.
In the fall of 1961, the editor-in-chief of the New World magazine, A. T. Tvardovsky, became acquainted with the story. Tvardovsky received permission to publish the story personally from the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union N. S. Khrushchev. Shch-854 under the changed title - One day of Ivan Denisovich - was published in No. 11 of the magazine “New World” for 1962. For the sake of publishing the story, Solzhenitsyn was forced to soften some details of the life of prisoners. The original text of the story was first published in the Parisian publishing house “Ymca press” in 1973. But Solzhenitsyn retained the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The publication of the story became historical event. Solzhenitsyn became known throughout the country.
For the first time, the undisguised truth was told about the camp world. Publications appeared claiming that the writer was exaggerating. But an enthusiastic perception of the story prevailed. For a short time, Solzhenitsyn was officially recognized.
The action of the story fits into one day - from waking up to lights out. The narration is told on behalf of the author, but Solzhenitsyn constantly resorts to improperly direct speech: in the author’s words one can hear the voice of the main character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, his assessments and opinions (Shukhov, a former peasant and soldier, was sentenced as a “spy” to ten years in the camps for being captured).
A distinctive feature of the poetics of the story is the neutrality of tone, when terrible, unnatural events and conditions of camp existence are reported as something familiar, ordinary, as something that should be well known to readers. Thanks to this, the “effect of presence” of the reader during the events depicted is created.
Shukhov's day described in the story is devoid of terrible, tragic events, and the character evaluates it as happy. But Ivan Denisovich’s existence is completely hopeless: in order to ensure a basic existence (to feed himself in the camp, barter for tobacco, or carry a hacksaw past the guards), Shukhov must dodge and often risk himself. The reader is forced to conclude: what were Shukhov's other days like if this one - full of dangers and humiliations - seemed happy?
Shukhov is an ordinary person, not a hero. A believer, but not ready to give his life for his faith, Ivan Denisovich is distinguished by tenacity and the ability to survive in unbearable circumstances. Shukhov's behavior is not heroic, but natural, not beyond the bounds of moral commandments. He is contrasted with another prisoner, the “jackal” Fetyukov, who has lost his self-esteem and is ready to lick other people’s bowls and humiliate himself. Heroic behavior in the camp is simply impossible, as shown by the example of another character, kavtorang (captain of the second rank) Buinovsky.
One Day by Ivan Denisovich is an almost documentary work: the characters, with the exception of the main character, have prototypes among the people the author met in the camp.
Documentation is a distinctive feature of almost all of the writer’s works. Life for him is more symbolic and meaningful than literary fiction.
In 1964, One Day of Ivan Denisovich was nominated for the Lenin Prize. But Solzhenitsyn did not receive the Lenin Prize: the USSR authorities sought to erase the memory of Stalin’s terror.
A few months after One Day of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s story was published in No. 1 of Novy Mir, 1963. Matrenin Dvor. Initially, the story of Matryonin's Dvor was called A village does not stand without a righteous man - according to a Russian proverb dating back to the biblical Book of Genesis. The name Matrenin Dvor belongs to Tvardovsky. Like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this work was autobiographical and based on real events from the lives of people familiar to the author. Prototype main character- Vladimir peasant woman Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova, with whom the writer lived, the narration, as in a number of Solzhenitsyn’s later stories, is told in the first person, on behalf of the teacher Ignatich (the patronymic is consonant with the author’s - Isaevich), who moves to European Russia from distant exile.
Solzhenitsyn portrays a heroine living in poverty, having lost her husband and children, but spiritually not broken by hardships and grief. Matryona is contrasted with selfish and unfriendly fellow villagers who consider her a “fool.” Despite everything, Matryona did not become embittered, she remained compassionate, open and selfless.
Matryona from Solzhenitsyn's story is the embodiment of the best features of a Russian peasant woman, her face is like the face of a saint on an icon, her life is almost a life. The house, the cross-cutting symbol of the story, is correlated with the ark of the biblical righteous man Noah, in which his family is saved from the flood along with pairs of all earthly animals. In Matryona's house, the animals from Noah's Ark are associated with a goat and a cat.
But the spiritually righteous Matryona is still not ideal. The deadening Soviet ideology penetrates into life, into the house of the heroine of the story (signs of this ideology in Solzhenitsyn’s text are a poster on the wall and an ever-incessant radio in Matryona’s house).
The life of a saint must end with a happy death, uniting her with God. This is the law of the hagiographic genre. However, Matryona's death is bitterly absurd. The brother of her late husband, the greedy old man Thaddeus, who once loved her, forces Matryona to give him the upper room (log hut). At a railway crossing, while transporting logs from a dismantled upper room, Matryona falls under a train, which personifies a mechanical, inanimate force hostile to the natural principle embodied by Matryona. The death of the heroine symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.
In 1963-1966, three more stories about Solzhenitsyn were published in Novy Mir: The Case at Krechetovka Station (No. 1 for 1963, the author’s title - The Case at Kochetovka Station - was changed at the insistence of the editors due to the confrontation between the New World and the conservative magazine "October", headed by the writer V.A. Kochetov), For the benefit of the cause (No. 7 for 1963), Zakhar-Kalita (No. 1 for 1966). After 1966, the writer’s works were not published in his homeland until the turn of 1989, when they were published in the magazine “New World” Nobel lecture and chapters from the book Gulag Archipelago.
In 1964, for the sake of publishing the novel in A. T. Tvardovsky’s “New World,” Solzhenitsyn reworked the novel, softening his criticism of Soviet reality. Instead of ninety-six written chapters, the text contained only eighty-seven. The original version told the story of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat's attempt to prevent Stalin's agents from stealing the secret of atomic weapons from the United States. He is convinced that with the atomic bomb, the Soviet dictatorial regime will be invincible and can conquer the still free countries of the West. For publication, the plot was changed: a Soviet doctor transmitted to the West information about a wonderful medicine, which the Soviet authorities kept in deep secret.
Censorship nevertheless prohibited publication. Solzhenitsyn later restored the original text, making minor changes.
The characters in the novel are fairly accurate portraits real people, prisoners of the “sharashka” in the village of Marfino near Moscow. The action of the novel takes place in less than three days - on the eve of 1950. In most chapters, events do not leave the walls of the Marfin "sharashka". Thus, the narrative becomes extremely rich.
“Sharashka” is a men’s brotherhood in which bold, free discussions are held about art, the meaning of existence, and the nature of socialism. (Participants in disputes try not to think about spies and informers). But “sharashka” is also the kingdom of death, a lifetime, earthly hell. The symbolism of death is invariably present in the novel. One of the prisoners, recalling the tragedy of Goethe's Faust, likens the "sharags" to the grave in which the servants of the devil Mephistopheles hide the body of Faust - the sage, the philosopher. But if in Goethe’s tragedy God frees Faust’s soul from the power of the devil, then the Marfin prisoners do not believe in salvation.
Marfa prisoners are privileged prisoners. Here - compared to the camp - the food is good. After all, they are scientists working on the creation of ultra-modern equipment that Stalin and his henchmen need. Prisoners must invent a device that makes it difficult for those overheard to understand telephone conversations(encoder).
One of the Marfa prisoners, the gifted philologist Lev Rubin (his prototype is the German philologist, translator L.Z. Kopelev), will say this about the “sharashka”: “No, dear, you are still in hell, but you have risen to its best highest round - to the first."
The image of the circles of hell is borrowed from the poem of the Italian writer Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy. In Dante's poem, hell consists of nine circles. Solzhenitsyn's hero Rubin makes an inaccuracy when he compares the inhabitants of the "sharashka" with the least guilty sinners - the virtuous non-Christian sages of Dante's poem. They are not in the first circle, but on the threshold of this circle.
There is a lot in the novel storylines. This is, first of all, the story of Gleb Nerzhin - a hero sympathetic to the author (his last name, obviously, means “not rusty in soul”, “not succumbing to rust / rust”). Nerzhin refuses to cooperate with the unjust authorities. He rejects the offer to work on secret inventions, preferring to return to the camp, where he could die.
This is the story of Lev Rubin, who despises his executioners and Stalin, but is convinced that there is another, pure, undistorted socialism. This is the line of the brilliant inventor and philosopher Dmitry Sologdin, who is ready to give his invention to satanic power, but at the same time boldly dictates conditions to the executioners. The prototype of Dmitry Sologdin to A.I. Solzhenitsyn was the Marfa prisoner - engineer and philosopher D.M. Panin; in Gleb Nerzhin one can see the features of Solzhenitsyn himself.
Prisoner Spiridon, an unscientist, has his own special path, common man. The benefit of family and relatives is the highest value for him. He fought bravely against the Germans, but he also deserted when he was faced with a choice: to defend the state or take care of life ordinary people…
Solzhenitsyn's narrative is like a choir in which the author's voice sounds muffled. The writer avoids direct assessments, allowing the characters to speak out. First of all, reality itself must confirm the inhumanity and deadening emptiness of the political regime of those years. And only in the finale, talking about the stage followed by obstinate prisoners who refused to bring their talents to the service of the executioners, the author openly breaks into the narrative.
In 1955, Solzhenitsyn conceived and in 1963-1966 wrote the story Cancer Ward. It reflected the author’s impressions of his stay at the Tashkent Oncology Clinic and the story of his healing. The duration of action is limited to several weeks, the place of action is the walls of the hospital (such a narrowing of time and space - distinguishing feature poetics of many of Solzhenitsyn’s works).
In the ward of the “cancer ward”, located in a large Central Asian city, the fates of different characters strangely connected, who would hardly have met each other in another place. The life story of the main character Oleg Kostoglotov resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself: he served time in the camps on trumped-up charges, and is now an exile. The remaining patients: worker Ephraim, Civil War who shot those who disagreed with the Bolshevik government, and in the recent past, a civilian in the camp, pushed around the prisoners; soldier Akhmadzhan, who served in the camp guard; Head of the HR Department Rusanov. He feels like a second-class citizen. Accustomed to privileges, isolated from life, he loves “the people”, but is squeamish about people. Rusanov was guilty of grave sins: he denounced a comrade, identified relatives of prisoners among the workers, and forced the innocently convicted to renounce.
Another character is Shulubin, who escaped repression, but lived his whole life in fear. Only now, on the eve of a difficult operation and possible death, does he begin to tell the truth about the lies, violence and fear that have shrouded the life of the country. Cancer equalizes patients. For some, like Efrem and Shulubin, this is approaching a painful epiphany. For Rusanov - retribution, which he himself did not realize.
In Solzhenitsyn's story, cancer is also a symbol of that malignant disease that has penetrated into the flesh and blood of society.
At first glance, the story ends happily: Kostoglotov is cured, and soon he will be released from exile. But the camps and prisons left an indelible mark on his soul: Oleg is forced to suppress his love for the doctor Vera Gangart, because he understands that he is no longer able to bring happiness to a woman.
All attempts to publish the story in Novy Mir were unsuccessful. The Cancer Corps, like In the First Circle, was distributed in samizdat. The story was first published in the West in 1968.
In the mid-1960s, when an official ban was imposed on discussing the topic of repression, the authorities began to view Solzhenitsyn as a dangerous adversary. In September 1965, a search was conducted at one of the writer’s friends who kept his manuscripts. The Solzhenitsyn archive ended up in the State Security Committee. Since 1966, the writer’s works have ceased to be published, and those already published have been removed from libraries. The KGB spread rumors that during the war Solzhenitsyn surrendered and collaborated with the Germans. In March 1967, Solzhenitsyn addressed the Fourth Congress of the Union Soviet writers with a letter in which he spoke about the destructive power of censorship and the fate of his works. He demanded that the Writers' Union refute the slander and resolve the issue of publishing Cancer Corps. The leadership of the Writers' Union did not respond to this call. Solzhenitsyn's confrontation with the authorities began. He writes journalistic articles, which are published in manuscripts. From now on, journalism became as significant a part of his work for the writer as fiction. Solzhenitsyn distributes open letters protesting against human rights violations and the persecution of dissidents in the Soviet Union. In November 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn became a laureate Nobel Prize . The support of Western public opinion made it difficult for the authorities of the Soviet Union to deal with the dissident writer. Solzhenitsyn talks about his opposition to communist power in the book A Calf Butted an Oak Tree, first published in Paris in 1975. Since 1958, Solzhenitsyn has been working on the book Gulag Archipelago - a history of repressions, camps and prisons in the Soviet Union (GULAG - Main Directorate of Camps). The book was completed in 1968. In 1973, KGB officers seized one of the copies of the manuscript. The persecution of the writer intensified. At the end of December 1973, the first volume of the Archipelago was published in the West... (the entire book was published in the West in 1973-1975). The word “archipelago” in the name refers to A.P. Chekhov’s book about the life of convicts on Sakhalin - Sakhalin Island. Only instead of one convict island of old Russia, in Soviet times there was an Archipelago - many “islands”. The Gulag archipelago is simultaneously a historical study with elements of a parodic ethnographic essay, and the author's memoirs telling about his camp experiences, and an epic of suffering, and a martyrology - stories about the Gulag martyrs. The narrative about the Soviet concentration camps is focused on the text of the Bible: the creation of the Gulag is presented as the creation of the world by God “turned inside out” (a satanic anti-world is created); the seven books of the Gulag Archipelago are correlated with the seven seals of the Book from the Revelation of St. John the Theologian, according to which the Lord will judge people at the end of time. In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn acts not so much as an author but as a collector of stories told by many prisoners. As in the story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the narrative is structured in such a way as to force the reader to see with his own eyes the torment of the prisoners and, as it were, to experience it for himself. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and a day later deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany. Immediately after the writer’s arrest, his wife Natalya Dmitrievna distributed in samizdat his article “Living not by lies” - a call on citizens to refuse complicity in the lies that the authorities demand from them. Solzhenitsyn and his family settled in the Swiss city of Zurich, and in 1976 moved to the small town of Cavendish in the American state of Vermont. In journalistic articles written in exile, in speeches and lectures delivered to Western audiences, Solzhenitsyn critically reflected on Western liberal and democratic values. He contrasts the law, justice, multi-party system as a condition and guarantee of human freedom in society with the organic unity of people, direct popular self-government; in contrast to the ideals of a consumer society, he puts forward ideas of self-restraint and religious principles (Harvard speech, 1978, article Our Pluralists, 1982, Templeton Lecture, 1983). Solzhenitsyn's speeches caused a sharp reaction among part of the emigration, who reproached him for totalitarian sympathies, retrogradeness and utopianism. The grotesquely caricatured image of Solzhenitsyn, the writer Sim Simych Karnavalov, was created by V. N. Voinovich in the novel Moscow-2042. In exile, Solzhenitsyn was working on the epic The Red Wheel, dedicated to the pre-revolutionary years. The Red Wheel consists of four parts - “nodes”: August the Fourteenth, October the Sixteenth, March the Seventeenth and April the Seventeenth. Solzhenitsyn began writing The Red Wheel in the late 1960s and completed it only in the early 1990s. August the Fourteenth and the chapters of October the Sixteenth were created in the USSR. The Red Wheel is a kind of chronicle of the revolution, which is created from fragments of different genres. Among them are a report, a protocol, a transcript (a story about Minister Rittich’s disputes with deputies State Duma; “incident report”, which analyzes the street riots of the summer of 1917, fragments from newspaper articles of various political trends, etc.). Many chapters are like fragments psychological novel. They describe episodes from the life of fictional and historical characters: Colonel Vorotyntsev, his wife Alina and beloved Olda; the intellectual Lenartovich, who was in love with the revolution, General Samsonov, one of the leaders of the State Duma Guchkov and many others. The original fragments are called “screens” by the author - similarities to cinematic frames with editing techniques and zooming in or out of an imaginary film camera. "Screens" are full symbolic meaning . Thus, in one of the episodes reflecting the retreat of the Russian army in August 1914, the image of a wheel torn off from a cart, colored by fire, is a symbol of chaos, the madness of history. In The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn resorts to narrative techniques characteristic of modernist poetics. The author himself noted in his interviews the significance of the novels of the American modernist D. Dos Passos for the Red Wheel. The Red Wheel is built on the combination and intersection of different narrative points of view, while the same event is sometimes presented in the perception of several characters (the murder of P. A. Stolypin is seen through the eyes of his killer - terrorist M. G. Bogrov, Stolypin himself, General P. G. Kurlov and Nicholas II). The “voice” of the narrator, designed to express the author’s position, often enters into dialogue with the “voices” of the characters; the true author’s opinion can only be reconstructed by the reader from the whole text. Solzhenitsyn, a writer and historian, is especially fond of the reformer, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Russia P. A. Stolypin, who was killed several years before the start of the main action of the Red Wheel. However, Solzhenitsyn dedicated a significant part of his work to him. The Red Wheel is in many ways reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn contrasts the acting political characters (the Bolshevik Lenin, the Socialist Revolutionary Kerensky, the cadet Miliukov, the tsarist minister Protopopov) with normal, humane, living people. The author of The Red Wheel shares Tolstoy's idea about the extremely large role of ordinary people in history. But Tolstoy's soldiers and officers made history without realizing it. Solzhenitsyn constantly puts his heroes before a dramatic choice - the course of events depends on their decisions. Solzhenitsyn, unlike Tolstoy, considers detachment and willingness to submit to the course of events not a manifestation of insight and inner freedom, but a historical betrayal. For in history, according to the author of the Red Wheel, it is not fate that acts, but people, and nothing is ultimately predetermined. That is why, while sympathizing with Nicholas II, the author still considers him inescapably guilty - the last Russian sovereign did not fulfill his destiny, did not keep Russia from falling into the abyss. Solzhenitsyn said that he would return to his homeland only when his books were returned there, when the Gulag Archipelago was published there. The New World magazine managed to obtain permission from the authorities to publish chapters of this book in 1989. In May 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He writes a book of memoirs A grain caught between two millstones (New World, 1998, No. 9, 11, 1999, No. 2, 2001, No. 4), appears in newspapers and on television with assessments of the modern policies of the Russian authorities. The writer accuses them of the fact that the reforms being carried out in the country are ill-conceived, immoral and cause enormous damage to society, which caused an ambiguous attitude towards Solzhenitsyn’s journalism. In 1991, Solzhenitsyn wrote the book How to Build Russia. Strong considerations. And in 1998, Solzhenitsyn published the book Russia in Collapse, in which he sharply criticizes economic reforms. He reflects on the need to revive the zemstvo and Russian national consciousness. The book Two Hundred Years Together, dedicated to the Jewish question in Russia, was published. In the “New World”, the writer regularly appeared in the late 1990s with literary critical articles devoted to the work of Russian prose writers and poets. In the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn wrote several stories and novellas: Two stories (Ego, On the Edges) (“New World”, 1995, 3, 5), called “two-part” stories Young, Nastenka, Apricot Jam (all - “New World” , 1995, No. 10), Zhelyabug settlements (New World, 1999, No. 3) and the story of Adlig Schwenkitten (New World, 1999, 3). The structural principle of “two-part stories” is the correlation of two halves of the text, which describe the fates of different characters, often involved in the same events, but unaware of it. Solzhenitsyn addresses the topic of guilt, betrayal and human responsibility for the actions he has committed. In 2001-2002, a two-volume monumental work, Two Hundred Years Together, was published, which the author devotes to the history of the Jewish people in Russia. The first part of the monograph covers the period from 1795 to 1916, the second - from 1916 to 1995. Editions of Solzhenitsyn A.I. Collected Works (20 vols.). Vermont, Paris, 1978−1991; Small collected works (8 volumes). M., 1990−1991; Collected works (in 9 volumes). M., 1999 - (publication continues); A calf butted an oak tree: Essays literary life. M., 1996; Red Wheel: A narrative in measured terms in four nodes (in 10 volumes). M., 1993−1997.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008, at the age of 90, at his dacha in Troitse-Lykovo, from acute heart failure. On August 6, his ashes were interred in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery behind the altar of the Church of St. John the Climacus, next to the grave of the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky.
Russian and Soviet writer Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the city of Kislovodsk on December 11, 1918. Alexander never saw his father. They lived in Kislovodsk with their mother until 1924, then moved to Rostov-on-Don.
Alexander Isaevich received a diploma from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University in 1941. A year later, after completing training at the artillery school in Kostroma, he was sent to the front as commander of a sound reconnaissance battery. As part of the battery, he went through the entire war, for which he was awarded many orders of varying degrees.
But already in 1945 he was arrested for sharp criticism of I.V. Stalin and sentenced to imprisonment for eight long years, which the writer served in the Moscow region. After his imprisonment, he remains in Kazakhstan and works as a mathematics teacher. Three years later, in 1956, the court found him not guilty and considered the criticism justified. Alexander Isaevich immediately moved to Russia, to the Ryazan region, works as a teacher and writes stories. It is also worth mentioning that in 1952, Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer and he successfully underwent surgery.
On February 12, 1974, Alexander Isaevich was again arrested and deported from the USSR to Germany. From there he and his family moved to Switzerland, and later in 1976, and finally to the USA. He was destined to return to Russia only 18 years later, in May 1994.
On August 3, 2008, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn passed away. He died at his dacha in Trinity-Lykovo from a stroke.
Born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, into a Cossack family. The father, Isaac Semenovich, died hunting six months before the birth of his son. Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak - from the family of a wealthy landowner. In 1925 (some sources indicate 1924) the family moved to Rostov-on-Don. In 1939, Solzhenitsyn entered the correspondence department of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (some sources indicate literary courses at Moscow State University). In 1941, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University (enrolled in 1936).
In October 1941 he was drafted into the army, and in 1942, after training at the artillery school in Kostroma, he was sent to the front as commander of a sound reconnaissance battery. Awarded with orders Patriotic War 2nd degree and Red Star. On February 9, 1945, for criticizing the actions of I.V. Stalin in personal letters to his childhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, Captain Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was arrested and on July 27 sentenced to 8 years in forced labor camps. He stayed in the camps from 1945 to 1953 in New Jerusalem near Moscow; in the so-called sharashka - a secret research institute in the village of Marfino near Moscow; in 1950-1953 he was imprisoned in one of the Kazakh camps. In February 1953 he was released without the right to reside in the European part of the USSR and sent to eternal settlement (1953-1956); lived in the village of Kok-Terek, Dzhambul region (Kazakhstan).
On February 3, 1956, by decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated and moved to Ryazan. Worked as a mathematics teacher. In 1962, in the magazine New World, with the special permission of N.S. Russian writer, public figure. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, Khrushchev published the first story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich (the story Shch-854 was redone at the request of the editors. One day of one prisoner). The story was nominated for the Lenin Prize, which caused active resistance from the communist authorities. In September 1965, Solzhenitsyn’s archive fell into the hands of the State Security Committee (KGB) and, by order of the authorities, further publication of his works in the USSR was stopped; already published works were confiscated from libraries, and new books began to be published through samizdat channels and abroad. In November 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but refused to travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony, fearing that the authorities would not allow him back to the USSR. In 1974, after the publication of the book Gulag Archipelago in Paris (in the USSR, one of the manuscripts was seized by the KGB in September 1973, and published in Paris in December 1973), the dissident writer was arrested.
On February 12, 1974, the trial took place. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was found guilty of high treason, deprived of citizenship and sentenced to deportation from the USSR the next day. Since 1974, Solzhenitsyn lived in Germany, Switzerland (Zurich), and since 1976 - in the USA (near the city of Cavendish, Vermont). Despite the fact that Solzhenitsyn lived in the United States for about 20 years, he did not ask for American citizenship. He rarely communicated with representatives of the press and the public, which is why he was known as a Vermont recluse. He criticized both the Soviet order and American reality. Over 20 years of emigration in Germany, the USA and France, he published a large number of works. In the USSR, Solzhenitsyn's works began to be published only in the late 1980s. In 1989, in the magazine Novy Mir, the first official publication of excerpts from the novel Gulag Archipelago took place. On August 16, 1990, by decree of the President of the USSR, the Soviet citizenship of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was restored. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the State Prize for his book The Gulag Archipelago. On May 27, 1994, the writer returned to Russia. In 1997 elected full member of the Academy of Sciences Russian Federation. He died on August 3, 2008 at his dacha in Trinity-Lykovo.
The great Russian writer Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. His father, Isaac Semyonovich, came from peasants in the village of Sablinskoye (now Stavropol Territory). An officer in the First World War, he died six months before the birth of his son from a hunting accident. Solzhenitsyn's mother, Taisiya Zakharovna, was the daughter of a large landowner from the Kuban, Zakhar Shcherbak, who in his youth began as a poor farm laborer, working for one meal, and then became rich through his own labors.
The new Secretary of the Central Committee for Ideology, Demichev, had a personal conversation with Solzhenitsyn, persuading him to become a loyal Soviet writer. But KGB imposed surveillance on A.I., installing wiretapping on most of his friends. On the evening of September 11, 1965, based on the wiretaps, a search was made at the homes of two acquaintances of the writer - V. Teusch and I. Zilberberg. The security officers seized Solzhenitsyn's archive from them - all his already written works, except for the carefully hidden "Archipelago". From these materials, it finally became clear to the Kremlin leaders what they had long suspected: in his criticism of the Soviet system, the writer goes much further than could be expected from “Ivan Denisovich” and “Matryona” - he denies communism as a whole, and not its individual “shortcomings.” "
Solzhenitsyn expected to be arrested, but the authorities chose a different tactic towards him. Fearing a violent public reaction in the USSR and the West, they decided not to make a fuss, but to “strangle” the writer slowly and gradually: to finally cut off his ability to publish in his homeland and launch a slander campaign. Hired lecturers began to tell at party meetings that Solzhenitsyn was in the camp for criminal business, but was at war Vlasovite. Published by Novy Mir in January 1966, the almost “neutral” story “ Zakhar-Kalita"became Solzhenitsyn's last legal publication in the Soviet Union until 1988. The KGB gave the “anti-communist” works of A.I. that it had captured to the most prominent official writers to read, and they wrote “indignant” reviews of them to the Central Committee.
In the winters of 1965-1966 and 1966-1967, Solzhenitsyn worked in Estonia on “Archipelago”. He continued to write the previously started story “Cancer Ward” about a former prisoner who was exposed to a fatal disease. The first part of the “Corps” was soon offered to the “New World”. Tvardovsky at first wanted to publish it, but then said that it was risky to come out with such a thing now. When other magazines rejected the story, A.I. gave it to Samizdat.
The public showed warm sympathy for Solzhenitsyn. In the fall of 1966, he began to be invited to speak to groups of scientific and cultural institutions Moscow. The authorities prohibited these meetings, but two of them were still held - at the Institutes of Atomic Energy and Oriental Studies. Both were attended by hundreds of listeners who applauded Alexander Isaevich’s reading of the most “daring” passages from “Corps” and “Circle”. On November 16, 1966, Moscow writers, despite obstacles from above, organized a discussion of the “Cancer Ward” in the House of Writers. The majority here expressed full support for the author of the story.
In May 1967, the IV Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers took place. Solzhenitsyn addressed him with open letter , where he pointed out that throughout the entire Soviet era, literature was under the yoke of administrators who did not understand anything about it, and the best masters pens were subjected to severe persecution. The presidium of the congress silenced the letter, but about 100 writers in a special appeal demanded to discuss it - this was an unheard of event for the USSR!
Many party bosses demanded severe repressions against Solzhenitsyn, but in the face of widespread approval of the letter by the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia, the authorities were afraid to completely denigrate themselves. In June and September 1967, the secretariat of the Writers' Union twice invited Alexander Isaevich to their place “for conversations.” Solzhenitsyn was urged to resolutely and publicly “dissociate himself from the bourgeois press,” which refused to support him. In return, they promised to give permission to publish “Cancer Ward” and refute the slander being spread. However, none of these promises were fulfilled. The KGB, on the contrary, resorted to a new “cunning plan.” In 1968, through his agents Victor Louis and Slovakian Pavel Licko, he handed over “Corpus” for publication to several Western publishing houses. The security officers hid their involvement in this action. After the new publications in the West, they hoped to intensify the fierce campaign against “Solzhenitsyn’s connections with hostile foreign countries” and convince everyone that he was publishing there for money. A.I. responded by stating that none of the foreign publishers received from him the right to publish “Cancer Ward.”
From the end of April to the beginning of June 1968, Solzhenitsyn, with his wife and devoted assistants E. Voronyanskaya and E. Chukovskaya, printed the final edition of “Archipelago” at their dacha in Rozhdestve-on-Istya. A week later, the film was transported to Paris by the hands of Leonid Andreev’s grandson, Alexander. However, it fell into the hands of Andreev’s unscrupulous granddaughter Olga Carlisle, who delayed translating the book into English, wanting to appropriate the copyright for it by hook or by crook. In 1971, Solzhenitsyn had to transfer a new film of “Gulag” to the West.
The secret history of the Gulag Archipelago. Documentary
On December 11, 1968, Alexander Isaevich turned fifty years old. More than 500 congratulatory telegrams and 200 letters from all over the country arrived in Ryazan. In a response letter to his faithful friends, the hero of the day said: “I promise... never to change the truth. My only dream is to be worthy of the hopes of reading Russia.”
N. Reshetovskaya was not too pleased with her husband’s refusal to give up the well-fed career of a Soviet literary master, caressed by the authorities. She was also annoyed by the fact that for the sake of secret work on new books, he was away from home for a long time, “does not live with his family.” Reshetovskaya and Solzhenitsyn had no children. In August 1968, Alexander Isaevich met a new young assistant - Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova. Very purposeful, energetic and hardworking, she helped arrange the largest and trouble-free storage of the writer’s archives. A love relationship soon began between her and Solzhenitsyn.
From the beginning of March 1969, A.I. began to write an epic about the 1917 revolution - “The Red Wheel", which he considered the main book of his life. The likelihood grew that the KGB would try to kill him, and in September 1969 Solzhenitsyn was invited to live at her dacha in the elite Zhukovka by the famous musical couple - Mstislav Rostropovich And Galina Vishnevskaya. In November 1969, at the insistence of the authorities, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. In response, he wrote an angry, accusatory letter to the SP Secretariat. Protest against the exclusion was expressed by many Soviet (Mozhaev, Baklanov, Trifonov, Okudzhava, Voinovich, Tendryakov, Maksimov, Kopelev, L. Chukovskaya) and Western writers.
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was nominated abroad as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature as " greatest writer modernity, equal to Dostoevsky." The Kremlin put pressure on the governments of France and Sweden to prevent the award of the prize to Solzhenitsyn, but on October 8, 1970, he was announced as its laureate. However, the Soviet campaign of threats was still not unsuccessful. At first A.I. wanted to go to Stockholm for the prize in order to “burst” there with a fiery speech against communism. But the frightened Swedes insisted: his visit should be as quiet as possible. They suggested that Solzhenitsyn, if possible, avoid communicating with the press and limit himself to a three-minute thank you during the Nobel banquet, to the sound of knives and forks. The trip to Stockholm lost its social meaning, and the writer abandoned it.
In the summer of 1970, it was learned that Natalya Svetlova would have a child from A.I. Not wanting to part with her Nobel laureate husband, Reshetovskaya made a demonstrative suicide attempt at Rostropovich’s dacha on October 14. She took sleeping pills, but they pumped her out. On the night of December 30, Natalya Dmitrievna gave birth to a son, Yermolai Solzhenitsyn.
In the winter of 1970-1971, Alexander Isaevich graduated from the first node of the “Red Wheel” - the novel “August of the Fourteenth”. It was sent to Paris, to Nikita Struve, the head of the YMCA-Press publishing house, and in June it was published there in Russian. This book, written from a Russian-patriotic standpoint, not only caused a new heart-rending howl from communist henchmen, but also alienated the Westernizing part of the intelligentsia from Solzhenitsyn, including a number of his recent close assistants.
Born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. Father - Isaac Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn (1891-1918), peasant. Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak (1894-1944). In 1940 he married Natalya Reshetovskaya. In 1941 he graduated from Rostov State University. That same year he was drafted into the army, where he rose to the rank of captain and received awards. In 1945 he was arrested and received 8 years in the camps for anti-Soviet activities. Released on February 13, 1953 and sent into exile. He was rehabilitated in 1956 and returned from exile the same year. In 1970 he received the Nobel Prize. In 1973 he married Natalya Svetlova. On February 13, 1974 he was expelled from the USSR. Returned to Russia on May 27, 1994. Died on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89. He was buried in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. Main works: “The Gulag Archipelago”, “In the First Circle”, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “Matryonin’s Dvor”, “Cancer Ward”, “Red Wheel” and others.
Brief biography (details)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a Russian writer-publicist, public and political figure of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Alexander Isaevich lived and worked not only in Russia, but also in the USA and Switzerland. He was considered a dissident for several decades. Outstanding figure born on December 11, 1918 in the city of Kislovodsk, into a worker-peasant family. At the age of 6, his family moved to Rostov, where he attended school. Under the influence of communist ideology, he joined the Pioneers and the Komsomol. He began writing in high school, and in 1937 he decided to write a novel about the 1917 revolution.
The writer received his higher education in Rostov state university, where he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. After graduating from the university, he was recommended for the position of university assistant. At the beginning of his literary career, he was actively interested in the history of the revolution and the First World War. In 1939, he entered the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History in the correspondence department of the Faculty of Literature. In 1941 he was forced to interrupt his studies due to the outbreak of war. In 1947, Solzhenitsyn wrote an autobiographical poem “Dorozhenka,” where he described his life during the war years.
The writer was critical of Stalin's policies, which he wrote about in some of his notes. As a result, he was arrested in February 1945. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to 8 years in the camps. Later his camp life he will describe in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” In 1952, he was diagnosed with a malignant tumor and the writer was operated on in the camp. In 1956, with the beginning of the struggle against the cult of Stalin, the writer was released and returned to Central Russia. For some time he taught physics and mathematics in high school. In February 1957, by decision of the Military Collegium, he was rehabilitated.
In the 1960s, Solzhenitsyn’s novels “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” were published. In 1970, the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1973, the writer’s manuscript “The Gulag Archipelago,” which told about correctional camps on the territory of the USSR, was confiscated. A year later he was arrested a second time for treason and deported to Germany. In 1976, the writer moved to the USA, where he continued literary activity. Only in the 1990s was he able to return to his homeland. The writer died on August 3, 2008 in Moscow. Before last days he was engaged in social and literary activities.
On December 11, 1918, one of the most significant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, was born in the city of Kislovodsk. The boy was born into a wealthy and educated Cossack family, about six months after the tragic death of his father.
While still in high school, Solzhenitsyn began writing poems and essays, but chose mathematics as his future specialty and entered the University of Rostov-on-Don. Nevertheless, literature attracted Alexander, so in 1939, in parallel with his studies at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, he entered the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History by correspondence.
In the spring of 1941, the future writer defended his university diploma with honors. The war prevented him from completing his literary education.
In 1942, Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the army. After graduating from the Kostroma Military School, he was appointed commander of a sound reconnaissance battery with the rank of lieutenant. Alexander fought bravely, received the rank of captain, and was awarded orders and medals.
February 1945 was a turning point in the fate of Solzhenitsyn. For anti-Stalin statements in a letter to a friend, he was arrested and sentenced to 8 years. For the first year, Solzhenitsyn worked in construction, the next three at a military research institute near Moscow, and then spent four years in the Ekibastuz camp doing general work. Here Solzhenitsyn composed plays, poems and poems, memorizing them by heart. Memories of this difficult period formed the basis of his most famous works: “In the First Circle”, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “Cancer Ward”, “Gulag Archipelago”.
In 1952, Alexander Isaevich was diagnosed with and removed a malignant tumor. A year later he was sent to settle in Kazakhstan, and four years later he was rehabilitated. Solzhenitsyn got a job as a teacher in Ryazan. While teaching physics and astronomy, he continued to write.
In 1961, Solzhenitsyn managed to convey to Alexander Tvardovsky a story about life in Stalin’s camps entitled “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The editor-in-chief of the New World magazine highly appreciated the work and began to work for its publication. With Khrushchev's personal permission, the story was published in Novy Mir, and Solzhenitsyn was accepted into the Writers' Union.
Not without censorship pressure and in a rather truncated form, other stories by the author began to be published, as well as excerpts from his novel “In the First Circle.” Solzhenitsyn’s play “Candle in the Wind” was staged at the Lenin Komsomol Theater.
The works of Alexander Isaevich are distinguished by their acute social orientation, firm civic position and high literary skill. The novel “Cancer Ward” and the full text of “In the First Circle” were never published. But Solzhenitsyn continued to work. Based on letters and oral stories of prisoners, he creates a literary and journalistic study “The Gulag Archipelago” and gives public readings of excerpts.
In 1965, the KGB confiscated the writer’s archives, and he was prohibited from engaging in literary activities. Two years later, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union, but soon “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle” were published abroad, and in 1970 Alexander Isaevich was awarded the Nobel Prize.
The writer's active social activities placed him among the most famous Soviet dissidents. The KGB even created a special department that dealt only with Solzhenitsyn. A real persecution of the author was organized in the press; his works were published exclusively in “samizdat”. After the publication of the first volume of the work “The Gulag Archipelago” abroad, Solzhenitsyn was deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the USSR.
The writer traveled almost all over the world, lived for a short time in Switzerland, then moved to the USA and only in 1994 was able to return to his homeland. During his exile, he worked on the ten-volume epic “The Red Wheel”, created numerous articles, plays and autobiographical works. In 2007, the writer was awarded the State Prize. Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.
His works raise deep moral issues. The artistic skill, observation and accuracy of the image, the stylistic expressiveness of each of Solzhenitsyn’s texts, the deep understanding and critical analysis of various social processes are amazing.
The literary work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn continues the epic, folk and linguistic traditions