Quicknation    Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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; born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. He was responsible for thrusting awareness of the Gulag on the world. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

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Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. During World War II, he served as the commander of an artillery position finding company in the Soviet Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. In February 1945 he was arrested for criticising 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.

The first part of Solzehnitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a i, special scientific research facilities run by Ministry of State Security: these formed the experiences distilled in i, published in the west in 1968. In 1950 he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the i. While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not then diagnosed.

From March 1953 Solzhenitsyn began a sentence of internal exile for life at Kol-Terek in southern Kazahkstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread, until by the end of the year he was close to death. However in 1954 he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was cured. These experiences became the basis of i.

During his years of exile, and following his reprieve and return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. He later wrote, in the short autobiography written at the time of his 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 mine 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 known."

Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached a poet and the chief editor of the i it was published in 1962, and would remain his only major work to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned his youthful Marxism and evolved toward his mature philosophical and religious positions. His gradual turn to a philosophically-minded Christianity is described at some length in the fourth part of i brought the Soviet system of prison labor (which existed during Stalin's rule) to the attention of the West, but it was his monumental history of the Soviet prisons for both criminal and political prisoners that won him the most acclaim in the West. It caused as much a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West. But the attention devoted to it in the West meant that Solzhenitsyn was a marked man. The printing of his work quickly stopped, and by 1965 the KGB had seized his papers, including the manu. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the monumental i 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. It discussed the system's origins from Lenin and the very founding of the Communist regime. The appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities. On February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

After a time in Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn was given accommodation by Stanford University to "facilitate [your] work, and to accommodate you and your family" He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution. Solzhenitsyn moved to Vermont in 1976. Over the next 18 years Solzhenitsyn completed his historical cycle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, i, and several shorter works. In 1990 his Soviet citizenship was restored, and in 1994 he returned to Russia.

Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in conservative circles in the West. But liberals and secularists were increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian patriotism and the Russian Orthodox religion. He also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, for example television and rock music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits...by TV stupor and by intolerable music."

Since returning to Russia in 1994 Solzhenitsyn has published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (i 2001, 2002). The latter has been received as philo-semitic by some and anti-semitic by others. In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically repudiates the idea that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the work of a "Jewish conspiracy" (see chapters 9, 14, and 15 of that work). At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime. The reception of this work confirms that Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad.

In his recent political writings, such as i (1998) Solzhenitsyn has criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet communism. He has defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.

(1971). The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR in an historical novel. The novel centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg (1914) in August, 1914. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story. (three volumes) (1973-78), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.A World Split Apart: Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Commencement Address to the graduating class at Harvard University