ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN:ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters.
He was a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. For a short period between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his people and single-handedly challenging the autocratic government of one of the world's two superpowers.
Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But it was the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward,and The First Circlethat secured for him the role of conscience of the nation. Later, he showed unmatched physical and moral courage in writing and publishing his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, a torrential narrative mixing history, politics, autobiography, documentary, corrosive personal comment and philosophical speculation into one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature.
Born in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, between the Black and Caspian seas, Solzhenitsyn was a year younger than the Russian Revolution. Despite a hard period as the only child of a sick churchgoing mother (his father had died before his birth), he grew up a loyal communist and supporter of the Soviet regime.
As a student at Rostov University, he edited the Communist Union of Youth newspaper with conspicuous success, and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement. While his degree was in mathematics and physics, he also studied for a diploma in literature and drafted the plan for an immense Tolstoyan novel intended to celebrate the October Revolution of 1917.
But it was his very devotion to revolutionary purity that was to prove his undoing. As an artillery captain during the second World War, he wrote letters to a friend expressing barely disguised hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule and hoping for a return to socialist principles when the war was over.
These letters were intercepted by Smersh, the Soviet counter-espionage service, and in July 1945, shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the labour camps and three years' administrative exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda".
The shock of this arrest and the subsequent privations he endured in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow were to lead to some of the finest pages in The Gulag Archipelago: "Of all the cells you've been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you will remember it with an emotion that can only be compared to memories of your first love."
During his first few months in the camps, Solzhenitsyn almost died from starvation and overwork. He was saved by his unexpected transfer to a sharashka, a scientific institute devoted to the study of decoding techniques and staffed by scientifically trained prisoners. Here he was thrown into the company of highly intelligent prisoners who broadened his intellectual horizons and forced him to re-examine his beliefs.
These experiences were to form the core of The First Circle (1969), whose title referred to Dante's circles of hell. A sub-plot in that novel reflected Solzhenitsyn's painful personal life. After his graduation from Rostov, in 1940 he had married a fellow student, Natalia Reshetovskaya, who had moved to Moscow following his transfer to the nearby sharashka, and was working for her doctorate in chemistry. Her laboratory was classified, and in 1952 she told Solzhenitsyn that she would have to divorce him to keep her position.
After three years at the sharashka, Solzhenitsyn was transferred in 1950 to a special camp in northern Kazakhstan, where he worked for three more years, first as a bricklayer, and then as a brigade leader in the machine shop. The grinding hard labour, the extremes of heat and cold, the brutality of the guards, and the corruption of the camp administration were evoked with brilliance in his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich(1962).
It was while still in the camps that Solzhenitsyn had his first brush with cancer. He was rushed to the infirmary in great pain and an operation for cancer of the groin was unsuccessful, and a few months later, in exile in southern Kazakhstan, he dragged himself to a cancer clinic in Tashkent. "That autumn I learned from my own experience that a man can cross the threshold of death while occupying a body that is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests things, but psychologically you have completed all your preparations for death and lived through death itself . . . Although you have never regarded yourself as a Christian - sometimes, indeed, the opposite - now you suddenly notice that you have already forgiven everyone who has insulted you." These words are spoken by the main character in Cancer Ward(1968), the novel Solzhenitsyn devoted to describing his ordeal. His experiences also provoked a spiritual crisis and a return to the Christian faith of his mother.
Solzhenitsyn's release from exile and rise to world fame is inextricably linked with Nikita Khrushchev, who encouraged the thaw after Stalin's death in 1953. Returning from exile in 1956 to Russia a free man, Solzhenitsyn was reunited with Natalia, who had remarried, but now left her second husband for Solzhenitsyn again and settled down as a schoolteacher in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow.
While in exile in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn had laboured to revise the works he had composed in the labour camps. They included a long narrative poem of thousands of lines, lyric poetry, plays, and the draft of the novel that was to become The First Circle. His camp experiences had taught him the Joycean virtues of "silence, exile, and cunning", and for several years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day. But he changed his mind after the party's 22nd congress in October 1961, when Khrushchev vowed to erect a monument to the victims of Stalinism, and Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of the influential magazine, Novy Mir, called on writers to tell the truth about "the era of the personality cult". Solzhenitsyn had just completed a short novel about a day in the life of a typical prisoner, which was less extreme in its political opinions than his early poems and plays. He asked his labour camp friend Kopelev to forward it anonymously to Tvardovsky.
Tvardovsky stayed up all night reading the manuscript, then deluged friends with the news that "a great writer has been born". He was obliged to go to Khrushchev himself to get the novel published. It is said that Khrushchev had to bully his Politburo colleagues into reading it. When they declined to make a decision, Khrushchev reportedly said: "There's a Russian proverb that says silence is consent." One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichcaused a sensation when it appeared in the November 1961 issue of Novy Mir. So daring were its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps that many Russians concluded that the censorship had suddenly been abolished. The elder statesman of Russian literature, Kornei Chukovsky, called the book "a literary miracle".
The responses of the reading public were even more overwhelming: "I kiss your golden hands," "thank you for your truthfulness". "Thank you, dear friend, comrade and brother. Reading your story I remembered the frosts and blizzards, the insults and humiliations. I wept as I read. Keep well, dear friend."
There had been nothing like it in the history of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn had achieved the miracle of pleasing both his country's leaders, its intelligentsia, and the broad mass of his readers. Moreover, his impact on foreign readers was almost as strong: within weeks his name was known all over the world. In quick succession he published three more stories in Novy Mir, the most memorable being the much anthologised Matryona's Place(1963), about a saintly peasant woman, with its celebrated conclusion: "None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand. Nor our whole land."
Solzhenitsyn's fall from official grace was almost as precipitous as his rise. In 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power, and Solzhenitsyn narrowly failed to win the Lenin Prize for literature. A year later, Leonid Brezhnev instituted his drive against the intellectuals.
By now Solzhenitsyn was halfway through Cancer Ward, but publication of part one was blocked by the authorities. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn was never again to be published while the Soviet regime remained in power.
Solzhenitsyn was convinced that his arrest was imminent but he remained unscathed and came to the conclusion that the authorities were afraid of him.
From 1966 to 1968, he fought doggedly to get either The First Circleor Cancer Wardinto print, and to have one or the other of his plays staged, but the KGB, under the leadership of Yuri Andropov, was just as determined to stop him.
Solzhenitsyn fought back in a celebrated open letter in March 1967 citing the long line of distinguished Russian writers suppressed or killed by the Soviet government and calling for a complete end to censorship.
The increasing repression of religious and nationalist dissent by the Brezhnev administration had led to the explosive growth of a dissident movement, which exerted leverage by appeals to the West for support. Solzhenitsyn capitalised on his international reputation by sending copies of his unpublished novels abroad. In 1968 part one of Cancer Wardwas published in English followed a year later by The First Circle.
Both novels were old-fashioned in their panoramic reach, their huge cast of characters and realistic manner, but innovative in their subject matter: the submerged and hitherto undescribed world of the labour camps. Solzhenitsyn was acknowledged as a "truth-teller" and a witness to the cruelties of Stalinism of unusual power and eloquence. He was hailed as a fearless chronicler of evil and as the greatest Russian writer of his time.
The Soviet invasion of Czecho- slovakia in 1968 inaugurated a new push against dissidents, and the following year, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. But, in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and, though he was barred from travelling to Stockholm to receive it, this greatly strengthened his position vis-a-vis the government.
Solzhenitsyn's increasingly conservative and patriotic views were now beginning to alienate him from liberal opinion in the Soviet Union. In his historical novel August 1914he painted a rosy picture of pre-revolutionary Russia, and, in three essays he praised Russia's Orthodox Church and authoritarian political tradition and excoriated the Russian intelligentsia for selling out to Soviet power.
In 1973, the KGB tracked down and confiscated a copy of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's immense camp history that he had written in the deepest secret and concealed for years from all but close intimates. Copies were already in the West, and when Solzhenitsyn learned of the KGB's coup, he displayed great personal courage in ordering its immediate publication. The appearance of volume one in January 1973 was a bombshell: the book went far beyond anything Solzhenitsyn had published before in revealing the abuses of the regime even as far back as the early 1920s, and placed, in the words of one commentator, "a burning question mark over 50 years of Soviet power". Another wrote that "the time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag".
The publication of The Gulag Archipelagoin the West provoked the Politburo to decree his immediate deportation, and after a sensational arrival by plane in West Germany in February 1974, he settled in Zurich for two years. There he was joined by his second wife, Natalia Svetlova and their three young sons.
In 1976 Solzhenitsyn moved to Vermont, and after making a badly received speech at Harvard about the West's derelictions in its dealings with the Soviet Union swore himself to public silence while working on a series of historical novels that continued the story of August 1914. Solzhenitsyn concluded the cycle earlier than he had wanted with April 1917(1991), possibly influenced by the fact that the historical novels were being met with neither critical nor popular success.
From the moment of his deportation Solzhenitsyn averred that he would return to Russia, and having remained aloof for three years after Yeltsin dismantled communism, he made a triumphal return in May 1994. In October 1994, he addressed Russia's parliament. He fully expected to be consulted by the country's political elite, but it did not happen. He was welcomed back with genuine warmth and gratitude, however, and though his television show was cancelled because of low ratings, the television adaptation of The First Circle, broadcast in 2006, gained a huge audience.
Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn had retired from public view, settling in a comfortable villa on the outskirts of Moscow. But despite his advancing years, he kept up a punishing work schedule and was rarely out of the news. He released a second volume of his memoirs, Invisible Allies(1995), describing his experiences in the West, and then a monumental history of the Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together(2001-02). Volume one had provoked a bitter controversy, with many accusing Solzhenitsyn of a barely concealed anti-Semitism, but others defended his courage in tackling such a controversial topic, finding it typical of Solzhenitsyn's genius for raising and examining "forbidden" subjects. In 2005 he counselled against rushing towards liberalism and in 2007 President Vladimir Putin visited Solzhenitsyn to award him a state prize.
Solzhenitsyn was essentially an old-fashioned artist working within the conventions of the 19th-century novel, but the pressure of his extreme subject matter, the passion and discipline he brought to his craft, and the exigencies of the times helped him to stretch the boundaries of Russian realism and find new expressive possibilities for it. He was a truth-teller and moralist of rare force, whose dedication to the ideals of freedom and justice took him beyond literature into the realms of history, philosophy, religion, politics and international affairs. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona's Place, The First Circleand Cancer Wardhave already entered the pantheon of Russian literature. The Oak and the Calfis one of the finest memoirs ever produced by a Russian writer, and The Gulag Archipelagois a unique epic, whose full literary and historical merit remains to be weighed.
Survived by Svetlova and their sons, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered in the short term as the bard of the Gulag, a fearless tribune who exercised a crucial liberating influence at a decisive moment in Soviet history, but in the context of the ages, his works will be read so long as readers thirst for the truth about life on this planet.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn: born December 11th, 1918; died August 3rd, 2008