AS the excitement of the Beijing Olympics was nearing its climax, a few days before the Games, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) passed away in his dacha, near Moscow, on August 3rd.

There is no doubt that other noises of the present world (lingering wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, endless in-fighting between Israel and Palestine forces, WTO disputes and the global food crisis, reforms of the EU institutions and presidential campaign in the US, etc.) will cover the silent demise of one of the latest great witnesses of the twentieth century.

Born in the Caucasia region to a Russian family, the novelist, dramatist and historian never knew his father, a young officer of the Imperial Army, who died before his birth. He was raised by his mother and an aunt with his three younger brothers and one sister. He grew up during the Russian Civil War (1917-1923), after which, despite the family’s very poor condition, his mother (who never remarried) fostered his inclinations for letters and the sciences. Educated also in the Christian Orthodox faith, he lost his mother when he was in his early twenties, before the beginning of the Second World War. As a college student at the Rostov State University, Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics, adding correspondence courses on philosophy, literature and history.

During the war, as an anti-artillery unit officer, he was twice decorated for his courage on some major offensives. But for his critical comments, written to a friend, on Joseph Stalin’s incompetent war strategies, he was later arrested in East Prussia. That ushered him into the life of a prisoner and an exile. Condemned in 1945 for anti-Soviet propaganda, he spent eight years in a labour camp followed by permanent internal exile. He recalled later his experiences as a miner, bricklayer and foundry man in his seventeen page novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published by the Novy Mir periodical in 1962. The novel was a sensation in the USRR, and awakened the West to the reality of the Soviet system of prison labour: no such piece of Soviet literature with its straightforward narrative had ever been published before on a politically sensitive topic and by a non-party member without being censored.

These years of imprisonment and exile were a pivotal period in Solzhenitsyn’s life. He rejected Marxism and launched himself into a philosophical and religious quest, very similar to Dostoevsky’s search for religious faith during his stay in Siberia. This makes the background of the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago, “The Soul and Barbed Wire”, his major literary work for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. The three-volume work is based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience and the testimony of 227 former prisoners; it also includes a research into the history of the penal system, discusses its origins in the foundation of the Communist regime, details interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, uprisings and revolts. On the practice of internal exile, the word gulag (a Russian acronym for the Soviet carceral system) entered then into the world’s political vocabulary.

Deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was also stripped of his Soviet citizenship. After some time in Switzerland, an invitation by Stanford University in the US helped him and his family in his research and living conditions. When later Harvard University gave him also an honorary Literary Degree on Thursday, June 8th 1978, he delivered his famous Commencement Address “A World Split Apart” in which he criticized modern western culture. Rehabilitated in 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia where he continued his research on Russian revolutionary history until his later years.

As a man who went through the main tragedies of his time, he outlived most of the world’s leaders: his awakening calls to the East and West deserve to be remembered.


Yves Camus 赵仪文, Editor

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