Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's father, a Cossack, died before Alexander was born. As his mother was very ill, he grew up mainly with his grandparents. They familiarised him with the Russian Orthodox faith and Russian customs and traditions. In 1924, his mother moved to Rostov-on-Don, where he also attended school. At the age of nine, he already had the desire to become a writer. He graduated from high school in 1936 and went on to study maths and physics in Rostov-on-Don. He actually wanted to study literature in Moscow, but he did not have the financial means to do so. In his youth, he was enthusiastic about the views and political orientations of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (→ Leninism). This resulted in numerous approaches and evaluations of his later confrontation with Stalinism, and on 7 April 1940 he married the chemist Natalya Alexeyevna Reshetovskaya. A year later, he was drafted into military service in the Red Army.

During the German-Soviet War, Solzhenitsyn fought as battery commander of an artillery unit in a sound measurement force. In this role, he took part in the Battle of Kursk (July 1943), Operation Bagration (1944) and the Vistula-Oder Operation in East Prussia (1945). He wrote down his experiences as an officer during the conquest of East Prussia in poem form in the volume Ostpreußische Nächte (Прусские ночи) and as a narrative in Schwenkitten ‘45 (Адлиг Швенкиттен). He was honoured for his services as a captain with the Order of the Great Patriotic War and the Order of the Red Star.

In February 1945, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was unexpectedly arrested at the front by military counterintelligence and transferred to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow because he had criticised Stalin in letters to a friend. In accordance with Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code, he was then sentenced to eight years in prison without a trial, followed by ‘eternal exile’. He spent his imprisonment in Gulag labour camps. He was initially housed in a special camp for scientists, where he met Lev Kopelev, who was also imprisoned. He wrote about his experiences in this special camp in 1968 in the novel The First Circle of Hell (В круге первом). As he refused to fulfil the work requirement to deal with specified scientific topics, Solzhenitsyn was later transferred to the Ekibastus camp complex in Kazakhstan for political prisoners. In this camp, he worked in a foundry.

Both in the special camp at the beginning of his imprisonment and in the Ekibastus camp, he experienced the camp inmates' struggle for survival and lived through the constant threat of hunger, riots and unfulfillable labour standards. Time and again, prisoners died in his neighbourhood. Solzhenitsyn, a former atheist and supporter of communism, also described his own spiritual development in his novel as a result of the suffering and experiences of this time. He later emphatically professed his orthodox Christianity.

In 1952, one year before his release from the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's wife Natalya (‘Natasha’) divorced him. This was initially by mutual consent in order to avoid further reprisals by the Stalinist power apparatus, as a marriage to a political prisoner could have led to dismissals or persecution. According to Natascha herself, she remained faithful to her husband during the first years of his imprisonment from 1945 to 1950, and ‘a feeling of great inner connection’ even seemed to deepen, although they were often only able to see each other a few times a year during this time.

However, Natasha then turned her back on him and let the new assistant professor at her institute, Vsevolod Somov, who already had a son, move in with her. Solzhenitsyn received a message from his aunt in the camp: ‘Natasha asked me to tell you that you can organise your life independently of her.’ Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer in 1951. This was one of the reasons why Natasha only let him know about the separation later through his aunt. The cancer was operated on in the camp hospital and it was hoped that no further metastases had formed.

In February 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released from the camp and went into exile. He was assigned the village of Berlik in the Kok-Terek district in the steppes of Kazakhstan as his place of exile. Shortly after his arrival there, he learned of Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, but despite his joy, he kept a low profile and merely began searching for better accommodation after this ‘glorious gift’, as Donald Thomas calls it in his biography of Solzhenitsyn. After initially being unable to find employment as a political prisoner, he was eventually given a job as a village school teacher, teaching maths, physics and astronomy.

In December 1953, he had to undergo medical treatment again due to a fist-sized tumour in his abdominal cavity, this time in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was last irradiated in 1955. The chance of survival was initially less than 30 per cent. He later wrote about his experiences during this treatment in the novel Krebsstation (Раковый корпус).

In 1957, during the thaw period, Solzhenitsyn was officially rehabilitated and his exile was lifted. In view of his cancer, his imminent death was expected. He then lived in Ryazan, where he worked as a teacher at the regional secondary school. This period was characterised by his reconnection with Natasha, whom he remarried in 1957, and his great enthusiasm for work. He saw it as his task to lend his voice to those who had been silenced. He often withdrew to huts away from civilisation in order to be able to write undisturbed. Natascha supported him personally and financially and enabled him to reduce his teaching commitments in favour of his literary work.

In 1962, he wrote one of his best-known works, the novella A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича) about the cruel everyday life of a prisoner in a Soviet labour camp and a confrontation with the Stalinist system. During this time, he began to work full-time as a writer. In September 1962, several artists were invited to Khrushchev's dacha on the Black Sea. On this occasion, Khrushchev became acquainted with the story of Ivan Denisovich and a year later authorised the publication of the novel August Fourteen, the first part of his trilogy on the history of Russia during the First World War, which was later published under the collective title The Red Wheel. As a delegate to the 4th Writers' Congress in 1967, he launched an “appeal for the abolition of censorship”. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union of the USSR on the grounds that he had published abroad without authorisation. In the years that followed, he worked on the subject of ‘The GULAG Archipelago’. At the end of the 1960s, he was generously taken in by his friend, the famous cellist Rostropovich, at his dacha. Rostropovich, who also tried to defend Solzhenitsyn in open letters to newspapers such as Pravda, eventually fell out of favour himself and had to leave the Soviet Union in 1974.

In 1971, a KGB agent poisoned Solzhenitsyn unnoticed with a ricin gel. This caused a serious illness, which was only later identified as a result of the attempted murder. In 1972, Solzhenitsyn and his first wife Natasha divorced again. In 1973, he married Natalya Dmitrievna Svetlova (1939), a mathematician whom he had met in 1968 and who had a son from a previous marriage. The couple had three sons together: Yermolai ( 1970), Ignat ( 1972) and Stepan ( 1973).Through an acquaintance from his work environment, the KGB obtained a manuscript of the first volume of the novel series The Gulag Archipelago (Архипелаг ГУЛАГ), in which Solzhenitsyn describes the Soviet camp system (Gulag), before it was published. He published the book under time pressure in Tamizdat. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested on 13 February 1974. While still in prison, he was charged with ‘paragraph 64’ (treason), and the very next day he was expelled from the Soviet Union and immediately flown to Frankfurt am Main. The acquaintance committed suicide in the face of the consequences of her actions.

Solzhenitsyn was initially taken in by Heinrich Böll in the Federal Republic of Germany; he later lived in Sternenberg in the holiday home of Zurich mayor Sigmund Widmer in Switzerland. Volume II of Archipel GULAG was also published during this time. This was followed in 1975 by The Oak and the Calf and Three Speeches to the Americans. In 1976, the family moved to the USA. The third volume of The GULAG Archipelago and East Prussian Nights were published here in 1976. At this time, he was already living in Cavendish in the US state of Vermont.

In 1980, the books The Deadly Danger / Warning of Communism and November Sixteen, the second volume of The Red Wheel, were published. After taking office in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost and perestroika. Andrei Sakharov was rehabilitated at the end of 1986, other opposition figures from the time of Stalin's purges (some posthumously) in 1987. Solzhenitsyn was readmitted to the Soviet Writers' Union in 1989. In the same year, his book March Seventeen - the third volume of The Red Wheel - was published.

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated and regained his Soviet citizenship. His book Russia's Way Out of the Crisis. A Manifesto. In 1991, the pending charges against him were dropped; in the same year, the Soviet Union collapsed. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on 27 May 1994. He now increasingly became a supporter of Russia's policy at the time and a leading figure of Russia's nationalist forces. In the same year, he published Progress at any Price and the book The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century. In order to give him better opportunities to express his views in public, he was offered his own television programme on Russian television. The programme was taken off the air shortly before the parliamentary elections on 17 December 1995 due to dwindling popularity. In the same year, his book Heldenleben. Two Narratives, and he had the opportunity to give a speech to the Russian parliament. Forty years after the publication of his first novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn positioned himself in his national epic Two Hundred Years Together (Двести лет вместе), published between 2002 and 2004, as an arch-conservative, intolerant interpreter of history on the Russian-Jewish question, who was prepared to work with anti-Semitic images of the enemy. In this late work, he clearly offered ammunition for the abuse of his humanist positions of the earlier creative years.Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on 3 August 2008 at 11.45 p.m. Moscow time at the age of 89 in his Moscow home and surrounded by his family as a result of a stroke. He was survived by his widow and three sons. The funeral took place on 6 August 2008 at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.