Alexander Solzhenitsyn grew up in Rostov-na-Donu, where he
studied mathematics at Rostov State Univ. He served in the Red
Army, rising to the rank of artillery captain, and was decorated
for bravery. In 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in
letters to a friend and sentenced to eight years in labor camps.
After completing his prison sentence, he was exiled to the Kazakh
SSR (now Kazakhstan). Stalin died in 1953 and Solzhenitsyn's
citizenship was restored in 1956. His first novels describe the
grimness of life in the vast labor-camp system. One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich was permitted publication in 1962
through the personal intervention of Nikita Khrushchev, in an
effort to encourage anti-Stalinist feeling. The book was hailed as
an exposé of Stalinist methods, and it placed the author in the
foremost ranks of Soviet writers. With Khrushchev's deposition,
Solzhenitsyn's succeeding works were banned, and he was continually
censured by the Soviet press.
With subsequent novels– The First Circle (1968), detailing the
lives of scientists forced to work in a Stalinist research center,
and Cancer Ward (1968), concerning the complex social microcosm
within a government hospital–censorship tightened, and Solzhenitsyn
was increasingly regarded as a dangerous and hostile critic of
Soviet society. His books found publication and an enormous
audience abroad, and in the USSR they were circulated in samizdat
(self-publishing, underground) editions. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was
expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and prohibited from
living in Moscow.
In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but
government pressure, specifically the threat of not being allowed
to return from Stockholm, compelled him to decline the prize. In
1973, fearing that he might soon be imprisoned again, Solzhenitsyn
authorized foreign publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a vast
work that he had completed in 1968 documenting, with personal
interviews and reminiscences, the operation of the oppressive
Soviet system from 1918 to 1956. In Feb., 1974, Solzhenitsyn was
arrested, formally accused of treason, stripped of his citizenship,
and forcibly deported to the West. In exile he personally accepted
his Nobel Prize in Stockholm (1974).
Solzhenitsyn ultimately settled in the United States, living in
rural Vermont, and in 1980 The Oak and the Calf and The Mortal
Danger were published. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev restored the
writer's citizenship and the following year treason charges were
dropped, laying the groundwork for Solzhenitsyn's 1994 return to
his homeland.
“Cannot fail to arouse bitterness and pain in the heart of the
reader. A literary and political event of the first magnitude.”
–New Statesman
“Stark . . . the story of how one falsely accused convict and his
fellow prisoners survived or perished in an arctic slave labor camp
after the war.”
–Time
“Both as a political tract and as a literary work, it is in the
Doctor Zhivago category.”
–Washington Post
“Dramatic . . . outspoken . . . graphically detailed . . . a moving
human record.”
–Library Journal
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