Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was
born on December 11, 1918,
in the Russian town of Kislovodsk, one year after the Communist
revolution of 1917. During this revolution,
the working classes led a successful revolt against the tsar of
Russia, Nicholas II. Solzhenitsyn’s family, which hailed originally
from the southern plains of Russia, was composed of intellectuals.
His father was killed in an accident before Alexander’s birth, and
this fatherless upbringing may help explain the absence of family
figures in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Solzhenitsyn was a good student and eventually enrolled in the mathematics
department of Rostov University. He was also interested in literature,
however, and began taking correspondence courses in literature at
Moscow State University, the largest and most prestigious university
in the Soviet Union.
After university, Solzhenitsyn was inducted into the Soviet
armed forces and saw active battle as a captain of artillery in
World War II. His military career was cut short in 1945,
however, when he was arrested for criticizing the harsh Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin in a private letter. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to
eight years in various prisons and labor camps. These institutions
were similar to the ones he describes in One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich and in his groundbreaking novel
about the Soviet labor camp system, The Gulag Archipelago.
Rehabilitated in 1956 after the 1953 death
of Stalin and the softening of the Soviet regime by Nikita Khrushchev,
the first secretary of the Communist party, Solzhenitsyn was released
and allowed to settle in Ryazan. There, he worked as a math teacher
and began to write fiction. He became famous in 1962 with
the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in
the leading Soviet literary journal of the time, Novy Mir (New
World). A landmark event in the history
of literature and politics in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn’s work
made the first public mention ever of forced collectivization of
farms and of the existence of labor camps. The mere mention of them
in print was unheard of at the time, and would have brought a life
sentence to Solzhenitsyn ten years earlier. Instantaneously, he
became a national and global celebrity.
Solzhenitsyn’s good fortune ended with the fall of Khrushchev
in 1964. Khrushchev’s critics came out of
hiding and began attacking former critics of Stalinism, including
Solzhenitsyn. Eventually, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was
denied further publication, and was forced into underground printings
known as samizdat—photocopies and hand-written
copies distributed from friend to friend. Solzhenitsyn continued
writing, producing The First Circle in 1968,
a novel about research scientists torn between obeying authority
and pursuing truth. In the same year he also produced Cancer
Ward, a novel based on his experience as a patient in a
Soviet cancer hospital. In 1970,
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He did
not travel to Sweden to accept the prize, however, because he was
afraid he would not be allowed back into the Soviet Union. He later
claimed the prize after his emigration from the country.
Solzhenitsyn’s interest in historical subjects grew after
this period. He published the first volume, August 1914, of
what he planned to be a vast multivolume work about World War I,
eventually to be called The Red Wheel. Later volumes
in this series include October 1916, March 1917, and April 1917. The Red
Wheel series focuses on the German victory in World War
I over the Russian tsarist regime and examines the weaknesses of
prerevolutionary Russian society. Solzhenitsyn also wrote about
the Stalinist camp system, which had been in place since the early
days of the Soviet Union but which Stalin vastly expanded. In December 1973, Solzhenitsyn
published The Gulag Archipelago, a literary study
of all aspects of the labor camps. The publication of this work
caused him to be arrested for treason on February 12, 1974.
He was stripped of Soviet citizenship and sent into exile. Solzhenitsyn
eventually settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1975,
where he raised his family. In 1980, he published
a study of Soviet literature, translated into English as The
Oak and the Calf.
In 1994, after the demise of the
Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland, settling in
St. Petersburg. There he became a vociferous critic of Western values,
including the excessive emphasis on independence. Skeptical of democracy,
he began to favor a compassionate authoritarian government based
on Christian values. He greeted the presidency of late-1990s
Russian leader Vladimir Putin with great optimism, but then retracted
his support, criticizing Putin’s policies loudly. Solzhenitsyn continues
to live in St. Petersburg and to write prolifically.
