Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Arithmetic of the Camps

In February 1945 a decorated Red Army artillery captain was arrested in East Prussia because SMERSH had been reading his mail. Over nineteen months, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had written to a fellow officer, Nikolai Vitkevich, complaining about Stalin. Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code took care of the rest: eight years. He had, by his own later admission, not questioned state ideology or Soviet superiority until the sentence was handed down. The eight years produced the most consequential non-fiction book of the twentieth century.

The Making of an Ordinary Soviet Man

He was born in Kislovodsk on 11 December 1918, weeks after the Armistice and in the middle of the Russian Civil War. His father, of Russian stock, had died in a hunting accident shortly before; his Ukrainian-descended mother raised him alone and poor. He read mathematics and physics at Rostov State University while taking correspondence courses in philosophy, literature and history from a Moscow institute — a double training that shows everywhere in his later work, where the historian's appetite for enumeration keeps colliding with the novelist's ear.

The war made him an artillery commander. In 1944 he won the Order of the Red Star for destroying German batteries. He was, in short, exactly the kind of man the Soviet system was built to reward, right up to the moment it read his correspondence.

Eight Years, a Tumour, and a Conversion

He served first in ordinary work camps, then in a *sharashka* — a prison research institute staffed with imprisoned scientists — where he met Lev Kopelev, later the model for a character in *The First Circle*. In 1950 he was transferred to Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan as a political prisoner and worked as a miner, a bricklayer and a foundry foreman. There an undiagnosed tumour developed; he was operated on inside the system. Released in 1953, he was exiled to Birlik in Kazakhstan, where the cancer nearly killed him before treatment in Tashkent put it into remission.

Out of this came two things he would spend his life defending. The first was the conviction that the camps were not an aberration of Soviet power but its logic. The second was his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, replacing the atheism and Marxism-Leninism he had carried into prison.

The Novella Khrushchev Approved

Exonerated during the post-1956 thaw and teaching mathematics, he wrote in secret. In 1960 he brought *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* to the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky. It was published in 1962 with Khrushchev's explicit personal approval — a single unremarkable day in a labour camp, told without hysteria — and detonated. It became a sensation and was studied in Soviet schools, an almost unrepeatable moment in which the state licensed the indictment of itself. "Matryona's Place" followed in 1963. It was the last thing he would publish legally at home for nearly thirty years.

Khrushchev fell in 1964 and the window closed. The KGB confiscated manuscripts, including *In the First Circle*. *Cancer Ward*, drawn from the Tashkent hospital, and *In the First Circle* both appeared abroad in 1968; *August 1914*, the opening movement of a vast historical cycle, in 1971.

The Book Written in Hiding

Between 1958 and 1967 he assembled *The Gulag Archipelago* in secret, working in friends' houses in Soviet Estonia, never keeping the whole thing in one place. It is three volumes and seven parts, built from his own experience plus the testimony of 256 former prisoners — not a memoir but a documentary architecture, a survey of an entire penal continent with its own geography, customs and language. Anne Applebaum has called it one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

The manuscript's hiding place was given up in 1973 after the KGB interrogated his friend Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, who then hanged herself. Solzhenitsyn released the book. It was published in the West that year.

Expulsion, and a Sermon at Harvard

He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature," and had not dared travel to Stockholm to collect it. On 12 February 1974 he was arrested, and the next day flown to Frankfurt and stripped of his citizenship. After Switzerland he settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976.

The West expected a grateful dissident and got a prophet with a grievance. His Harvard commencement address of 8 June 1978 attacked "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness," media sensationalism, "intolerable music," and the Western assumption that the rest of the world should mature into copies of Western systems. He simultaneously endorsed American anti-communism, defended the Vietnam War, and blamed the antiwar movement for what followed in Southeast Asia. He was nobody's asset.

The Return, and the Quarrels

His citizenship was restored in 1990; he came home in 1994 with his wife Natalia Svetlova, and hosted a monthly television monologue until 1995. The last years were combative. He denied that Ukrainians were a separate people with a non-Russian language, calling the idea a "recently invented falsehood," and argued for a united Slavic state. His two-volume *Two Hundred Years Together* (2001–02) on Russian-Jewish history revived long-standing accusations of antisemitism; Richard Pipes read it as reproducing the Russian far right's account of the Revolution, while Elie Wiesel judged him "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be antisemitic. He denounced NATO expansion as the work of "aggressors," opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2003 Iraq invasion, and supported Vladimir Putin.

Why Aleksandr Is Called a Genius

The faculty at issue is architectural rather than lyrical. Solzhenitsyn's distinctive power was the ability to hold an enormous, deliberately obscured system in his head and render it as a structure — to take a machine that consumed millions of people across eleven time zones and give it a coherent shape, with parts, functions and a history. *The Gulag Archipelago* is the demonstration: 256 witnesses, no archives, no research assistants, no ability to keep notes safely, assembled over nine years in other people's houses, and the result is navigable. That is a feat of organisation and retention before it is a feat of prose, and it is where the mathematician shows.

The Swedish Academy's citation named "ethical force" rather than literary innovation, and the choice of words was exact. The counter-case follows from it. As a novelist he is often judged blunt, didactic and structurally lax; the *Red Wheel* cycle, which he considered his real life's work, is largely unread even by admirers. His late writing on Ukraine and on Jews is not merely unfashionable but, in the view of serious historians, tendentious and poorly sourced. And much of his moral authority derives from what he survived rather than from what he thought — his political prescriptions, once he was free to issue them, persuaded remarkably few people in any country. What is not disputed is the central act: he made the camps undeniable, in a form no government could refute.

What the Book Did

He died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, aged 89, and was buried at the Donskoy Monastery in a plot he had chosen himself. *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* had made the Gulag speakable inside the Soviet Union; *The Gulag Archipelago* made it indefensible outside it, and did measurable damage to Western fellow-travelling from which it never recovered. Whatever else he was — reactionary, scold, nationalist — he remains the writer who did that.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1970
• Medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
• Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class
• Templeton Prize
• Order of the Red Star — 1944
• Notable work: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• Notable work: The First Circle
• Notable work: Cancer Ward
• Notable work: The Gulag Archipelago
• Genres: short novel, opinion journalism and lexicography