Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- ) is perhaps the best Russian writer of the 1900s. He is most famous for the “Gulag Archipelago” (1973). Unlike most writers of his time, he has a strong Christian outlook and even looks like a bearded prophet.
For writing the truth about the evils of communist Russia, especially its system of political prisons known as the Gulag, he was a hero in the West and won a Nobel Prize in 1970.
He first wrote about one day of one man in the Gulag in the book that made him famous, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” (1962). Then he detailed the whole system in an 1800-page book called “The Gulag Archipelago.”
In “Gulag” he showed that communism is not evil because Stalin was evil: communism was evil from the ground up. Even Lenin, his hero as a boy, was part of that evil.
He sent the book secretly to the West. In 1974, a few months after it appeared, he was banished.
While he lived in America in the mountains of Vermont, he wrote his Red Wheel series about the history of Russia in the 1910s when the communists took over. Solzhenitsyn was not so much writing as rewriting history from the lies the communists have told of those times.
When he got to America he did not keep quiet about its evils either. In his 1978 speech at Harvard he said that while America has an incredible wealth of things, spiritually it is very poor. (Mother Teresa has said the very same thing). Americans do not act like men, but like animals in a herd – even their leaders, intellectuals and news reporters. They do not recognize evil and stand up to it.
After the fall of communism he returned to Russia in 1994. He crossed Siberia in a train speaking at the towns along the way. He had a television talk show in 1995, but it did poorly.
The new Russia made Solzhenitsyn sad: it had copied all that was worst in the West.
Solzhenitsyn says that if Russia does not get its moral foundation right no amount of money will save it. He longs for a Holy Russia based on God and country. To many Russians he seems old-fashioned and out of touch.
Solzhenitsyn experienced the Gulag first-hand. After fighting the Germans fearlessly for three years in the Red Army during the Second World War, he was thrown in prison for letters he wrote to an old school friend. The state opened the letters and saw the disrespectful things he said about the man with the moustache. Everyone knew he meant Stalin.
After eight years as a political prisoner of Stalin – a light sentence in those days – he was banished to what is now Kazakhstan. It was ruled by Russia in those days but it was not home. He taught high school and wrote his books in secret.
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The best Russian writer of the 20th century? Hardly. Political influence, such as it was, doesn’t translate into genius (nor vice versa).
Andrey Platonov and Vladimir Nabokov (who couldn’t be more different from one another) are the most likely contenders, as far as I’m concerned.
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Nabokov: are you basing that on his Russian works alone?
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Yes, even by his Russian works alone (including Russian Lolita).
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Platonov is anything but an easy or entertaining read, btw. Not even particularly rewarding, I’m afraid, unless you’re in a right state of mind. But a genius nonetheless.
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I have always kept a copy of The Gulag Archipelago since childhood. It blasted me out of my little universe as a child that apartheid was not the only evil. I have a battered yellowed copy. I have only read till the end of The Interrogation, in which he painfully describes in detail the methods of torture.
Very difficult reading.
This is an underlined extract from Chapter One.
“Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.”
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis- placements in our universe, and both· the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life’s experience, can gasp out only: “Me? What for?” And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.”
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That is a great quote^
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