Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 1918-2008 (Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn)

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 1918-2008 (Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Russia; died of heart failure, August 3, 2008, in Moscow, Russia. Educator, novelist, dramatist, poet, and author. Solzhenitsyn emerged from Stalin's notorious labor camps to join the company of revered Russian writers who had persevered and survived government repression, despite repeated attempts to silence them. His odyssey began during World War II, when a private letter to a personal friend was intercepted and perceived to be treasonous. For eight years Solzhenitsyn endured the harsh reality of the prison system that he later immortalized as "the gulag." Solzhenitsyn was released in 1953 and exiled to the desert, where he found work as a teacher of mathematics and began to write poems and plays that he never expected to publish. A period of cultural liberalization during the Khrushchev regime ended Solzhenitsyn's exile and enabled him to publish the short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Russian, in Moscow, in 1962. The understated but shocking account of life in the camps triggered outrage and dissent throughout the country. The relaxation of censorship was predictably brief, and later novels like Cancer Ward (1968), based on the author's hospitalization for cancer surgery, were published in the West before appearing, if at all, in Russian. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 but did not accept it in person for fear that he would be prevented from returning home. In 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in the West. The three-volume work exposed the deliberate cruelty of the vast system that Stalin used to punish dissenters and provide millions of workers to industrialize his backward empire. The government responded swiftly, and Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country in 1974. He moved to Vermont, where he lived for twenty years. He may have found political freedom in America, but it is not clear that he ever found happiness. Solzhenitsyn criticized the permissiveness and commercialism of America and constructed a tall fence around his property that isolated him from unsolicited intrusions. He adopted the long beard and physical appearance of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, and his writings took on the ambiguous tone of the ancient oracles. In Vermont he began to write The Red Wheel, a massive, part-fictionalized, and largely unintelligible history of Russia from the collapse of the last czarist regime to the end of World War I. In 1994 Solzhenitsyn was allowed to return to Mother Russia, but he was soon disillusioned. The people who thronged to embrace him in the countryside had adopted much of the materialism and self-indulgence of the West, and the new intellectual elite in the cities no longer regarded his lifework as relevant. In 2006, however, a major Russian bank began the publication of a proposed thirty-volume collection of Solzhenitsyn's complete works. Many of them had never before seen the light of the Russian dawn. Solzhenitsyn's life had come full circle, but he was never able to return to the Russia that he had fought for in World War II. It was gone. In its place was a new order that, for better or worse, his own powerful condemnation of tyranny and fight for human rights had helped to shape.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, and others, Solzhenitsyn: A Pictorial Autobiography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1974.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Bodalsra telenok s dubom, YMCA Press (Paris, France), 1975, translation by Harry Willetts published as The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, Harper (New York, NY), 1980.