Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (2)

In March this year, I wrote a story here about my prized collection of books by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, books which I have since donated to the library of The Old Frees' Association. I felt that it is far better to share these books with my fellow members than to keep them unread at home. 

Today, I read from facebook an item on Solzhenitsyn which was posted in A Daily Dose of History. It's quite interesting and I feel that by reproducing it here, I can ensure that I can retrieve the story easier from my own blog than to search for a story that's buried beneath millions of facebook posts. So here it is:

While serving in the Soviet army in the closing days of World War II, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to a friend, in which he was critical of Josef Stalin and Stalin’s conduct of the war. The letter was discovered by Soviet intelligence authorities and Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a work camp. When his term ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile in rural Kazakhstan. While there he would experience a philosophical and religious transformation that informed the rest of his life’s work.

In 1956 Solzhenitsyn was released from exile and permitted to return to Moscow, where he taught high school and secretly began writing his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, describing life in a Stalinist work camp. In 1960 Solzhenitsyn risked showing the manuscript to a Soviet editor. Because Khrushchev was attempting to purge the Soviet Union of Stalinism, he personally approved the book’s publication, and it became a smash hit. But Solzhenitsyn didn’t remain long in favor. Subsequent works were prohibited as being “anti-Soviet” and after Khrushchev was removed from power, Solzhenitsyn was deemed a “non-person” and the KGB raided his home and seized his manuscripts.

During this time, Solzhenitsyn was secretly writing his Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume examination of life in Soviet labor camps, hiding portions of the manuscript at the homes of various friends. In 1973, after the KGB had located and seized one of the three copies of the manuscript, Solzhenitsyn had a microfilmed copy smuggled out of the country and in December it was published in Paris.

The Soviet authorities felt somewhat constrained in what they could do to Solzhenitsyn, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was an international celebrity. The Politburo considered sentencing him to life in prison, but instead deported him to West Germany. Solzhenitsyn made his way to the United States where he lived and worked for almost 20 years. While he praised and admired Western liberty and democratic values, Solzhenitsyn criticized the West for underappreciating, devaluing, and misusing them. He also criticized the West’s cultural weakness and its loss of religious and spiritual grounding. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, where he was received as a hero. He died in August 2008, at age 89.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, one hundred three years ago today.

“(T)he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”