Alexander Solzhenitsyn: dead, aged 89
p2pnet news view | Freedom:- Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive chronicler of Communism, Stalin style, died yesterday at the age of 89.
He “shook the foundations of Soviet rule with his monumental work ‘The Gulag Archipelago,” says the Moscow Times.
“Solzhenitsyn’s damning accounts of the horrors of Soviet labor camps earned him international fame and prompted Soviet authorities to send him into exile abroad, where he spent 20 years before returning to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Once a devoted Leninist, he was a decorated Red Army captain who led an artillery company on the front lines from November 1942 to February 1945, says the story, going on:
“It was then that Solzhenitsyn was arrested – an event that would change his life forever and set the tone of his future literary career.
“Disillusioned by the mismanagement of the war effort, and appalled by the Red Army’s looting as it reached Germany, he made critical references to Stalin in correspondence with a friend. The NKVD read his letters and arrested him for ‘anti-Soviet agitation.’ He was sentenced to eight years in prison – considered a mild sentence at the time.
“Thanks to his mathematical training, Solzhenitsyn was initially spared the worst excesses of the gulag. From 1946 to 1950 he was confined to a ’sharashka,’ a special prison for scientists forced to work on government projects. The experience later became the basis for his novel ‘The First Circle’.”
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,” says The Guardian.
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona’s Home, The First Circle and Cancer Ward have already entered the pantheon of Russian literature. The Oak and the Calf is one of the finest memoirs ever produced by a Russian writer, and The Gulag Archipelago is a unique epic, whose full literary and historical merit remains to be weighed.”
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Moscow Times – Solzhenitsyn, Chronicler of Soviet Labor Camps, Dies at 89, August 4, 2008
The Guardian -Russia’s literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime, August 4, 2008
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