Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89
Written by John Erianne on August 4, 2008 – 4:22 am -
“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ”
“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory. “
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet dissident and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is dead at 89 of a heart attack.
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsky on December 11, 1918. He attended Rostov University where he studied mathematics and took a course in literature at Moscow State University.
He served as an artillery captain in the Red Army during WWII. It was while serving on the German front in 1945 that he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a letter addressed to a friend. Solzhenitsyn was found guilty and sent to a Soviet labor camp in Kazakhstan. He was finally released after serving 8 years. His first novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich drew from his own experiences.
His next novel, The First Circle, described the lives of a group of scientists forced to work in a Soviet research facility, and Cancer Ward, based on his experiences as a cancer patient, were both banned after Nikita Khrushchev fell from power. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and deported from Moscow.
In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but was not allowed to go to Stockholm to collect it. Solzhenitsyn continued to write and his novel about WWI, August 1914, was banned in the Soviet Union but was published abroad. This was followed by his memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. This led to him being charged with treason and arrested yet again. This time, the government took away his citizenship and deported him to what was then West Germany.
Solzhenitsyn, who finally collected his Nobel Prize in 1974, settled in the United States where he continued to write. Lenin in Zurich was published in 1975. This was followed by two works of non-fiction, The Oak and the Calf and The Mortal Danger as well as the novel, November 1916.
In 1994 Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and the charge of treason was dropped. Later that year he returned to the Soviet Union where he spent his remaining years living in seclusion.
Although his stature as a writer had waned by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he stood as one of the most important voices of the latter half of the 20th century was a beacon of hope to many for more than a generation.
