Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich
Александр Исаевич Солженицын
Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
11.12.1918 Kislovodsk
+ 03.08.2008 Moscow

Russian writer and publicist.
Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1970.
Symbol of the struggle against communist power in the USSR.

Childhood and youth

Alexander Isayevich was born on December 11, 1918 in the North Caucasus region in the spa town of Kislovodsk. His father Isayev Semyonovich was a Russian peasant and his mother Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbakova the daughter of a Ukrainian landowner. Their meeting occurred during his mother's studies in Moscow. During the Great War (World War I), Isayev Semyonovich volunteered for the army, where he served at the rank of officer. His father died before the birth of his fourth son, who was Alexander, on 18.06.1918 from an accident sustained while hunting (in addition to his three brothers, Alexander had one sister). As a result of collectivization, the family lost its property, so in 1924 Taisiya Zakharovna moved with her children to Rostov-on-Don.

Alexander started school in 1926. After graduating from high school, he studied at Rostov State University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Due to the influence of the school, despite his upbringing, which was strongly oriented towards religion, he began to embrace communist ideology and joined the Komsomol in 1936 (he was probably not a member of the pioneer organization). During his studies, Alexander married chemistry student Natalia Reshetovskaya (07.In parallel with mathematics, he also studied literature by distance learning at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, and at the beginning of his literary work he devoted himself to the theme of World War I and the socialist revolution.

2. World War

When the USSR was invaded (22.06.1941) by the Greater German Reich and thus began a war not only for the Russian people, which the Soviet propaganda called the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война), he was not initially mobilized, but together with his wife he was sent as a teacher to Morozovsk (Mоророзовск) in Rostov Oblast (Ростовской oblast).

October 18,1941 he was called to the trenches as a private soldier. He applied for a posting to the artillery apprenticeship, and so in April the following year he was assigned to the artillery apprenticeship at Kostroma (Kostroma), graduating from this in November 1942 and being appointed to the rank of lieutenant. He is then sent to Saransk (Сара́нск) where there was a reserve artillery regiment that was in the process of forming a field sound artillery battery. In February 1943, he was appointed commander of a sound artillery battery of the 794th Independent Army Reconnaissance Artillery Detachment, with which he later fought as part of the 68th Sevreshet Cannon Artillery Brigade in the formation of the 2nd Belorussian Front (Field Post 07900).

His combat tour began near the town of Orel (Orёл) and ended in East Prussia. During the war, he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War (Орден Отечественной войны) and the Order of the Red Star (Орден Красной Звезды). In November 1943 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and in June 1944 to the rank of captain. During the war he kept a diary and also sent some of his works to the Moscow Literary Newspaper. In 1944 his articles were favourably reviewed by B. A. Lavrenev.

Jail

In February 1945, he wrote a private letter to a friend (Nikolai Vitkevich) in which he criticized Stalin, for certain decisions regarding the conduct of the war and for violating some of Lenin's economic theses (he compared life in the USSR under Stalin to serfdom). The letter was intercepted by the military censor, and the author was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned in the infamous NKVD detention center Lubljanka in Moscow.

He was charged with the crime of anti-Soviet propaganda under Section 10, paragraph 58 of the Criminal Code and the establishment of an enemy organization under Section 11. On June 7, 1945, he was sentenced in absentia by a three-man NKVD tribunal to eight years in prison and subsequently to life in so-called internal exile.

In August he was deported to the New Jerusalem labor camp (Novy Ierusalem), but on September 9, 1945, he is in the Kaluga Gate camp (Kaluzhskie Vorota). In June 1946, he is claimed by the 4th Department of the NKVD and in September he is transferred to a special camp at the aircraft engine factory in Rybinsk (Ры́бинск - then the city was called Shcherbakov), in another five months he goes to a camp in Zagorsk (Moscow Region) and in July 1947 to a similar facility in Mavrina, a part of Moscow. Both of the latter facilities bear the Russian name sharashka (sharashkha) which is the name for special scientific research facilities run by the Ministry of State Security for the use of imprisoned scientists (just for the record - similar facilities were passed through by A. N. Tupolev, V. M. Petlyakov, V. M. Mjasischev, S. P. Korolyov and others). Here he also began writing the short story "I Love the Revolution" (Lюби revoluцию). Later he described his experiences in Mavrina in his novel "In the First Circle" (В круге первом).

In April 1948 he divorced his first wife for the first time (according to some sources it was in 1952).

In May 1950 he was transferred to Butyr Prison (Бутырская тюрьма) for a quarrel with the command of the Mavrina Institute, and in August he was sent to a labour camp near the town of Ekibastuz (Экибастузе) in Kazakhstan. Here he performed various professions in coal mining. His experiences appear in the short story "One Day of Ivan Denisovich". On 13.02.1953, Alexander Isaevich was released from the performance of his eight-year test.

After his release from the camp, he is sent for life to the so-called internal exile in the village of Berlik in the Zhambyl region (Берлик, Джамбульская область) in the south of Kazakhstan. There he worked as a mathematics and physics teacher. At the end of 1953, his health began to deteriorate due to stomach cancer and he was sent to a hospital in Tashkent in January the following year. His experience of treatment in this hospital would later be reflected in the book "Cancer".

Early Years of Release

Following a decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR in June 1956, he is exempted from further internal exile in absentia without being rehabilitated, and so in August he returns to central Russia and lives in the village of Miltshevo (Kurlovsky District of Vladimir Oblast), teaching mathematics at a secondary school. Here he also meets his ex-wife, whom he remarried on 02.02.1957. At the beginning of July 1957 he moves to Ryazan (Ряза́нь), where he starts teaching astronomy at the local high school.

Two years later (1959) he starts writing a book, initially titled "Z-854", about the life of an ordinary peasant prisoner. This book, influenced by a speech given by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky (Aлекса́ндр Три́фонович Твардо́вский), editor of the magazine New World, at the XXII. He sent it to Tvardovsky, who began to push for its publication with Khrushchev, for consideration at the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Коммунисти́ческая па́ртия Сове́тского сою́за, KPSU). Although the story was heavily censored by the censors, it was eventually published, despite the opposition of some members of the Soviet Politburo, in the magazine Novy Svet No. 11, 1962, under the title "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" and was almost immediately translated into many foreign languages. The response to the publication of " One Day...." was a flood of letters from former prisoners of the Soviet regime, which provided the author with much of the material for his more obscure work, "The GULAG Archipelago" (Aрхипелагу ГУЛАГ). Solzhenitsyn was nominated for the 1964 Lenin Prize for this story, but the proposal was rejected in the "voting". Alexander Isayevich became a member of the Soviet Writers' Union on December 30, 1962.

After the publication of his first story in the pages of Novy Svet, he published other works in this magazine, including Matrena's Court (Mатрёнин dvůr), The Case at Kochetovka Station (Случай на станции Кочетовка), and In the Interest of the Cause (Для пользы дела). In the autumn of 1964, the Leninsky Komsomol Theatre in Moscow staged Solzhenitsov's play "Swiecha ve větru" (The Candle in the Wind). Tvardovsky, who had read the manuscript of "Rakovina", began to seek its publication through Khrushchev's advisor Lebedev. However, this effort was unsuccessful.

In 1964 some of Solzhenitsyn's works were published through samizdat under the title "Studie i drobnye narratie" (Kroхотки), this volume of short stories went abroad, where it was published in Frankfurt by the magazine Grani (October 1964). The following year, he is increasingly monitored by the KBG and his works are banned.

Dissident

After the accession of Brezhnev to the post of First Secretary of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the legal publication of A. I. Sozhenitsyn's books is almost impossible. In addition, in September 1965, his private archive, which contained material for his novel "The GULAG Archipelago", is confiscated by the Soviet KGB secret police. The writer took advantage of the omission of some of the powerful of the then USSR and began to actively associate with foreign journalists. At the same time, his novels "In the First Circle" (В круге первый) and "Cancer" (Раковый корпус) were published in samizdat.

In May 1967, he sent a "Letter to the Congress" addressed to the Union of Soviet Writers, which soon became known among the Soviet intelligentsia as well as in the West. The following year, his novels "In the First Circle" and "Cancer" were published in the USA and Western Europe, which brought him considerable popularity, as expressed by his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1969. Almost immediately, Soviet propaganda launched a vicious campaign against Solzhenitsyn. During this campaign he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, among other things. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 (which Solzhenitsyn saw as having political overtones), he was offered voluntary departure from the USSR by the Soviet authorities, which he refused.

Since August 1968, he has maintained a relationship with his later second wife Natalia Dimitrievna Svetlova, while seeking a second divorce, which he achieved only on 22 August 1972.

His other works are largely Orthodox-patriotic and thus meet with partial misunderstanding from the reader. From 1972 to 73 he works on the epic "The Red Wheelbarrow" (Kraсное колесо).

During this period, the pressure of the Soviet authorities on dissidents also begins to increase. On the day Alexander is interviewed by foreign correspondents (August 23, 1973), one of the collaborators of the writer Elizabeta Denisovna Voronyanskaya (Елизавета Денисовна Воронянская) is arrested by the KGB, and during the interrogation he reveals the existence of the manuscript of the novel "The Gulag Archipelago". Solzhenitsyn learns of this only on September 5 and asks for the printing of "The Archipelago" to be expedited by the YMCA-Press, an exile publishing house in Paris. Subsequently, he sent a letter to the Supreme Soviet (Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union, Письмо вождям Советского Союза) calling on them to abandon communist ideology and to transform the Soviet Union into a Russian nation-state. At the same time, the Western press launched a campaign in defence of Soviet dissidents, and in particular A. I. Solzhenitsyn. In the USSR, a similar campaign of the opposite kind was launched.

N. Reshetovskaya's ex-wife proposed on 24.09.1973 the possibility of publishing the novel "Cancer" in the USSR in exchange for not publishing "The GULAG Archipelago" abroad (allegedly this was done at the instigation of the KGB, but Reshetovskaya later stated that it was exclusively her activity). Alexander did not refuse to publish "Cancer" in the USSR, but he did reject the possibility of a tacit agreement with the Soviet authorities. The first publication of "The GULAG Archipelago" occurred in December 1973, after which the author was portrayed by the Soviet media as a World War II-era traitor and was labeled a "literary hairdresser."

On January 7, 1974, after the novel's publication, the Soviet Politburo discussed the possibility of suppressing anti-Soviet activity by Solzhenitsyn. The same issue was later addressed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Центральный комитет Коммунистической партии Советского союза) at the initiative of the Politburo. Subsequently, the following options were proposed: expulsion (voted for by J.V. Andropov), arrest and detention (voted for by Kosygin, Brezhnev, Podgorny, Shelepin). In the end, Andropov managed to get his point across. On 12 February Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason. A day later he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship by the court and expelled from the USSR, put on a plane and transported to the Federal Republic of Germany. His family suffered a similar fate on March 29, 1974.

Exile

Shortly after his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn toured Scandinavia. The family settled in Zurich. On 03.03.1974, the "Letter to the Leader of the Soviet Union" was published in Paris; representatives of the Western press and many democratically-minded dissidents of the USSR, including Sakharov, described the "Letter" as undemocratic, nationalistic and containing dangerous ideas. As a result of this assessment, relations between the Western press and Solzhenitsyn began to deteriorate.

In 1974-75, with the proceeds from the sale of the novel "The Gulag Archipelago", he founded the Russian Public Fund for Aid to the Persecuted and Their Families (Russky общественный Fond pomoci преследуемым и их семьям), which provided aid primarily to political prisoners in the USSR, both legally and illegally. At the same time, during these years, he also worked on collecting materials about Lenin's stay in exile for the epic "The Red Wheelbarrow".

In April 1975, he and his family went on a tour of Canada and the USA, during which he visited Washington and New York. On this occasion, he addressed a trade union convention and a session of the United States Congress. In his speech, he strongly criticised the Communist regime and called on the USA to refuse to cooperate with the Soviet regime and to end its policy of détente. He still saw the West as an ally in Russia's liberation from communist totalitarianism. He returned to Zurich in August of that year, but by February 1976 he had already embarked on a tour of Britain and France. By this time, anti-Western attitudes were beginning to appear in his speeches.

During his visit to Spain (March 1976), he gave a televised speech endorsing the recently ended government of Franco and warning Spain against a rapid transition to democracy. After this speech, he became increasingly criticized by the Western press, and many European and American politicians began to show their disapproval of Solzhenitsyn's views.

In April 1976, he and his family moved to the United States to the small town of Cavendish, Vermont. He does not appear in public or in the press as often.

Back in Russia

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was restored and he was also awarded the State Prize for his novel "The GULAG Archipelago". Four years later Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalia returned to Russia (May 27, 1994 to be exact). In 1997 he became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A year later he refused the Order of St. Andrew. A year before his death, President Vladimir Putin congratulated him on his recent award of the State Prize of the Russian Federation during a personal visit. Until his death, he and his wife lived on a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково), west of Moscow, among the dacha where former Soviet leaders Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (Михаил Андреевич Суслов) and Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (Константин Устинович Черненко) lived.

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 90 on 3. August 2008 at 23.45 Moscow time, of acute heart failure.

His literary work was greatly influenced by his personal experiences at the front and in the Gulag.

Dvěstě let pospolu (Двести лет spolu) -
a two-volume work that gave rise to the labeling of Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Semite. The book describes the interactions between Russians and Jews, and criticizes the role of Jews in Russian history.

One Day of Ivan Denisovich (Odden день Ивана Денисовича) -
This novel describes one day as a prisoner in a Communist political labor camp. A man who went to the hell of the Soviet Gulag for 10 years on the basis of a fabricated trial and under Section 854.

In the First Circle (В круге первый) -
here the author chronicles his time in the Sharashka facilities in the late 1940s. In the USSR in the 1940s.

Trkalo se tele se dubem (Бодался теленок с дубом) -
autobiographical work.

Rakovina (Раковый корпус) -
a novel describing the treatment of cancer in the USSR in the period around 1956. The author himself experienced this treatment in 1954 in Tashkent.

The Case at the Kochetovka Station (Случай на станции Кочетовка) -
a short story depicting life at a railway station in the Soviet Union during World War II.

The Red Wheelbarrow (Красное колесо) -
a novel series that offers a look at the development of Russia from the 1905 Revolution through World War I. World War to the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 (the Revolutionary Revolution).

Souostrovi GULAG (Архипелаг ГУЛАГ ) -
A three-volume novel written based on his own experience as well as the accounts of fellow prisoners. The author considers himself a kind of chronicler of the Gulag and has stated that he wrote this book as a duty to the people who were unjustly imprisoned and tortured there and who paid with their lives for their stay in these camps.

Russia in Ruins (Россия в обвале) -
A book devoted to the status and prospects of Russia after the end of the Cold War.

This list is not exhaustive, but it captures perhaps the most important and best-known works of A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

Resources:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/
en.wikipedia.org
http://www.ukprofind.com/solzhenitsyn/
http://literature-prize.com/solzhenitsyn.htm
en.wikipedia.org
www.slovakradio.sk
http://noblit.ru/content/category/4/89/33/
URL : https://www.valka.cz/Solzenicyn-Alexandr-Isajevic-t74856#275503 Version : 0
and a few photos at the end
Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič - Butyrské káznice , zde byl vězněn v mezi květnem a srpnem 1950.

Butyrské káznice , zde byl vězněn v mezi květnem a srpnem 1950.
Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič - Fotografie pořízená během pobytu v táborech GULAGu

Fotografie pořízená během pobytu v táborech GULAGu
Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič - Fotografie z roku 1970

Fotografie z roku 1970
Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič - Rok 1994 , po návratu do Ruska

Rok 1994 , po návratu do Ruska
Solženicyn, Alexandr Isajevič - 
Rok 2007

Foto: REUTERS

Rok 2007

Foto: REUTERS

URL : https://www.valka.cz/Solzenicyn-Alexandr-Isajevic-t74856#276287 Version : 0
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