A tribute to Solzhenitsyn

August 6th, 2008 | by Vijayaraghav |

 

A tribute to Solzhenitsyn

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away in Moscow last Sunday. He was 89 and was suffering from heart ailment.  

 

When Russian publishers released the first of the 30 volumes of his works two years ago, he was in fragile health.  His wife Natalia said during that occasion that, “Let us just hope he will live to see the project’s end—which he doesn’t believe himself.”  Unfortunately death took him away by shattering her hopes.  His complete works are expected to be released in Russia by 2010.   

 

Solzhenitsyn opened the eyes of the world to the brutality of Stalin’s camps with writings that brought him the wrath of the Soviet authorities and years of persecution.  Detained for criticizing Stalin, he angered the Soviet authorities by highlighting the torment and suffering in the labour camps.  It’s a popular view that the October revolution of 1917 resulting in a violent totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia’s earlier history of Tsarism and culture. Solzhenitsyn argued that Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union.  Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing that Marxism itself is violent.  His conclusion is that Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced.  He argued that communism was only cared for nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling the people.  Once in power, communism tried to wipe clean every nation, destroying its culture and oppressing its people. 

 

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books were sold world wide and translated into various languages.  In 1970 he was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature. 

 

Aleksandr Isayovich Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia on December 11, 1918.  His father Issaky Solzhenitsyn was an army officer. His father was killed in a hunting accident after a few months. His mother Taisia Solzhenitsyn fought for survival and brought him up.  She died in 1940. He was a good student with an aptitude for mathematics.  His mother was the inspiration behind his literary initiatives and scientific learning’s till her death in 1940. In 1941, he graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and maths.  A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist.   

 

During World War II, he served as the commander of an artillery position and was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.  In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile.  He wrote in the short autobiography written during the time of being awarded the Nobel Prize that “during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mind in print in my lifetime, but also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become unknown.” 

 

When Leonid Brezhnev took over as party leader in October 1964, Solzhenitsyn was being silenced. His life was restricted by the disease of cancer and it lead to the birth of his widely acclaimed novel “Cancer Ward”, which first appeared outside Soviet Union in 1969.  He finally got admitted to a cancer clinic in Tashkant. After undergoing medical treatment and resorting to traditional medicine, he recovered fully.  In 1956, he has received a letter from the authorities informing that his period of internal exile had been lifted and he was free to move.   He said “ No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.”   

 

On February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.  The German novelist Heinrich Boll welcomed Solzhenitsyn.  Six weeks after expulsion, his second wife, Natalia Svetlova and their three sons Yermilai, Ignat and Stephan, joined Solzhenitsyn.  She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts.  After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. 

 

Solzhenitsyn believed that his stay in the United States would be temporary. “In a strange way, I not only hope, I am inwardly convinced that I shall go back” he told the BBC.  “I live with that conviction.  I mean my physical return, not just my books.  And that contradicts all rationality”. 

 

Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994. In October 1994, he addressed Russia’s parliament.  As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened.  After settling into a new home in Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia. 

 

I first encountered Solzhenitsyn’s works in 1990, and devoured “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.  He plunged into the literary scene in November 20, 1962 with the publishing of this novel in the journal Novy Mir.  Solzhenitsyn’s character Ivan is a workingman, though not in a “Workers of the World unite” sense, Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of Ivan is both straightforward and ironic.  He has been incarcerated by a system founded upon the illusory rise of the working class.  It portrays an ordinary workingman coping with extraordinary hardship.  The adaptability and resilience of the human spirit in the face of a dehumanizing environment is part of what has made it great.  The key is Ivan’s fierce devotion to work as a contributing factor to both his pride and survival skills. The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk.  He felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep. He was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.   

 

Like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov, he achieved immortality before he became conscious of his power as a writer. But soon after the hard-liners campaigned to silence him.  They stopped publication of his works and soon confiscated his manuscripts and denounced him as a traitor. 

 

Over the next few decades he wrote evocative novels like “The First Circle”, The Cancer Ward”, The Gulag Archipelago” and “Red Wheel”.  Through these works he drew his experiences of totalitarian duress. 

 

The Cancer Ward was legally published in the Soviet Union.  As it had to get the approval of the Union of Writers, and though some appreciated it, ultimately was denied permission.  It is tremendously stunning, powerful and thought provoking Novel.  It tells the story of a group of patients and doctors, set in a hospital ward in 1950s Russia.  The story is drawn from his own experience when he was on treatment in a hospital due to cancer.  When thrown together to face with mortality, the characters discuss what is important.  It depicts that any situation can be tolerable even though the personal happiness can be at the cost of others.  Solzhenitsyn showed honesty and courage while shaping up a moving story keeping in mind his ordeal for survival.   

 

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system.  It was based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn’s own research into the history of the penal system.  It discussed the system’s origins from Lenin and the very founding of the Communist regime, detailing everything from interrogation procedures and prisoner transports, to camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile.   The appearance of the book in the west put the word gulag into the western political vocabulary. 

 

“The Red Wheel” was focused on the revolutionary chaos that had spawned Bolshevism and set the stage for modern Russian history.  It has been compared, at least in its sweep and intentions, with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. 

 

Solzhenitsyn was committed to publish his works outside Soviet Union.  By doing so, he had become one of the literary victims of Stalin, like Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and got expelled from the Writer’s Union.  He fought back relentlessly.  Hundreds of well-known intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, Gunter Grass, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes, Arther Miller and John Updike signed petitions against his silencing and joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union.  When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 amidst protests from Moscow, the Nobel jurists cited him for “The ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian Literature”. 

 

In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the US did not understand the Vietnam War.  He argued that although many anti war proponents were sincere about stopping all wars as soon as possible, they “became accomplices… in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there.  He also condemned the bombing of Serbia, saying that there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler. 

 

He said, “Until I came to the west myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the west had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it… All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs.  He described the problems of both east and west as a disaster rooted in agnosticism and atheism”.  He referred to it as the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness “It has made man the measure of all things on earth – imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.  We are now paying for the mistakes, which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity, which used to restrain our possessions and our irresponsibility”. 

 

He dismissed western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet.  In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin.  In the last years of his life he supported Putin and praised him as the restorer of Russia’s greatness. 

 

As Solzhenitsyn said, “Artists have greater responsibilities, it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more, to defeat the lie” he proved that courageously through his struggle and prolific writing. 

 

May his departed soul rest in peace.