His major works include:
- A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
- The First Circle (1968)
- Cancer (1968)
- The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1974-76)
- The Oak and the Calf (1975)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, and was deported to the West in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994 and died near Moscow on 3 August 2008.
Solzhenitsyn’s Background
Alexander Solzhenitsyn grew up a fervent Leninist in southern Russia. He won a Stalin scholarship to study math and physics, and took literature courses by correspondence. Graduating just as World War II was breaking out, he joined the army, and rose to the rank of captain of the artillery.
As the war was ending in 1945, Soviet censors intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend containing a joke about Stalin.
Incarceration in the Russian Labour Camp
Solzhenitsyn’s casual comment cost him eight years in the infamous forced labour camps, the gulag. He was not allowed to keep a diary, so he wrote in his head, committing each incident to memory. When he got out, he began to put on paper what he had memorised.
His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first appeared in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1962, when Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev was easing the repressive restrictions of the Stalin era. Further publication of Solzhenitsyn's work was banned, but nearly 900,000 copies of Ivan Denisovich were already in circulation.
Publication of The First Circle
The First Circle was published in 1968 with the help of a secret army of mostly middle-aged women, who were devoted to Solzhenitsyn. The women smuggled microfilm of his work out of the Soviet Union for publication in the West. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Kremlin's response was swift and furious. Solzhenitsyn was viciously attacked in the Soviet press. In 1974, the author was arrested and charged with treason. The following day his citizenship was revoked and he was sent into exile.
Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago over a 10-year period, from 1958 to 1968. He withheld publication, later explaining that his obligation to protect those still living outweighed his obligation to the dead. He changed his mind in December 1973, when the KGB confiscated a copy of the manuscript.
A Threat to Soviet Russia
Decades later, KGB documents made public in the post-Soviet era revealed that members of the Soviet Politburo were more worried about the threat posed by Solzhenitsyn than they were about the United States.
Life in Exile From Russia
In exile, Solzhenitsyn lived briefly in Switzerland, and then moved to the United States. The following year, officially approved excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Novy Mir.
In August, 1990, Solzhenitsyn's citizenship was restored, and, the following year, Soviet prosecutors dropped the treason charge. It would be another two and a half years, more than 20 years after his expulsion, before he would go back to Russia.
Solzhenitsyn’s literary monument, The Gulag Archipelago, was an achievement little short of the miraculous, given the circumstances under which the information was collected and digested, and given the obstacles that stood in the way of the work's seeing the light of day. It is fair to say that the three-volume textdid more than any other publication to cause society to take notice of the western world, on the views of Stalinist communism.
Source:
Thomas, D.M. Alexander Solzhinitsyn Abacus, 1999. ISBN-10: 0349111154
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