At one time, M. Gorky very accurately described the contradictory character of the Russian person: “Piebald people are good and bad together.” In many ways, this “piebaldism” became the subject of research by Solzhenitsyn.
The main character of the story “An Incident at Kochetonka Station” (1962), a young lieutenant Vasya Zotov, embodies the kindest human traits: intelligence, openness towards a front-line soldier or encirclement entering the room of the line commandant’s office, a sincere desire to help in any situation. Two female images, only slightly outlined by the writer, highlight Zotov’s deep integrity, and even the very thought of cheating on his wife, who found herself in occupation under the Germans, is impossible for him.
The compositional center of the story is Zotov’s meeting with those around him who have lagged behind his echelon, who amazes him with their intelligence and gentleness. Everything - the words, the intonations of his voice, the soft gestures of this man, who is capable of carrying himself with dignity and gentleness even in the monstrous flaw he wears - attracts the hero: he “was extremely pleased with his manner of speaking; his manner of stopping if it seemed that the interlocutor wanted to object; his manner is not to wave his arms, but to somehow explain his speech with light movements of his fingers.” He reveals to him his half-childhood dreams of escaping to Spain, talks about his longing for the front and looks forward to several hours of wonderful communication with an intelligent, cultured and knowledgeable person - an actor before the war, a militiaman without a rifle - at its beginning, his recent entourage, who miraculously escaped German “cauldron” and now lagged behind their train - without documents, with a meaningless catch-up sheet, in essence, not a document at all. And here the author shows the struggle of two principles in Zotov’s soul: human and inhuman, evil, suspicious. Already after a spark of understanding ran between Zotov and Tveritinov, which once arose between Marshal Davout and Pierre Bezukhov, which then saved Pierre from execution, a circular appears in Zotov’s mind, crossing out the sympathy and trust that arose between two hearts that had not yet had time to cool down. war. “The lieutenant put on his glasses and again looked at the catch-up sheet. The catch-up sheet, in fact, was not a real document; it was drawn up from the words of the applicant and could contain the truth, or it could contain a lie. The instructions demanded that we treat those around us extremely carefully, and even more so those who are alone.” And Tveritinov’s accidental slip of the tongue (he only asks what Stalingrad was called before) turns into disbelief in Zotov’s young and pure soul, already poisoned by the poison of suspicion: “And - everything broke off and went cold in Zotov<...>. So, not an encirclement. Sent! Agent! Probably a white emigrant, that’s why his manners are like that.” What saved Pierre did not save the unfortunate and helpless Tveritinov - the young lieutenant “surrenders” the person he had just fallen in love with and was so sincerely interested in to the NKVD, and Tveritinov’s last words: “What are you doing! What are you doing!<...>You can’t fix this!!” - are confirmed by the last, chordal, as always with Solzhenitsyn, phrase: “But never in his entire life could Zotov forget this man...”.
Naive kindness and cruel suspicion - two qualities that would seem incompatible, but completely conditioned by the Soviet era of the 30s - are combined in the hero’s soul.
The inconsistency of character sometimes appears from the comic side - as in the story “Zakhar-Kalita” (1965).
This short story is entirely built on contradictions, and in this sense it is very characteristic of the writer’s poetics. Its deliberately lightweight beginning seems to parody the common motifs of confessional or lyrical prose of the 60s, which clearly simplify the problem of national character.
“My friends, are you asking me to tell you something about summer cycling?” - this beginning, setting up something summery, holiday and optional, contrasts with the content of the story itself, where on several pages the picture of the September battle of 1380 is recreated. But even turning back six centuries, Solzhenitsyn cannot sentimentally and blissfully, in accordance with the “bicycle ”beginning, to look at the turning point in Russian history, burdened with historiographical solemnity: “The truth of history is bitter, but it is easier to express it than to hide it: not only the Circassians and Genoese were brought by Mamai, not only the Lithuanians were in alliance with him, but also Prince Oleg of Ryazan.<...>That’s why the Russians crossed the Don, so that the Don could protect their backs from their own people, from the Ryazan people: they wouldn’t hit you, Orthodox Christians.” The contradictions hidden in the soul of one person are characteristic of the nation as a whole: “Isn’t this where the fate of Russia came from? Is this where the turn of her story took place? Was it always only through Smolensk and Kyiv that enemies swarmed against us?..” So, from the inconsistency of national consciousness, Solzhenitsyn takes a step towards exploring the inconsistency of national life, which led much later to other turns in Russian history.
But if the narrator can pose such questions to himself and comprehend them, then the main character of the story, the self-proclaimed watchman of the Kulikovo field Zakhar-Kalita, simply embodies an almost instinctive desire to preserve the lost property. historical memory. There is no sense in his constant, day and night, presence on the field, but the very fact of the existence of a funny, eccentric person is significant for Solzhenitsyn. Before describing it, he seems to stop in bewilderment and even slips into sentimental, almost Karamzin-like intonations, starting the phrase with such a characteristic interjection “ah”, and ending with question marks and exclamation marks.
On the one hand, the Warden of the Kulikovo Field with his senseless activities is ridiculous, just as ridiculous are his intentions to reach Furtseva, the then Minister of Culture, in search of his truth, known only to him. The narrator cannot help but laugh, comparing him with a dead warrior, next to whom, however, there is neither a sword nor a shield, and instead of a helmet there is a worn-out cap and a bag with selected bottles near his arm. On the other hand, the completely disinterested and meaningless, it would seem, devotion to Paul as a visible embodiment of Russian history makes us see something real in this figure - grief. The author's position is not clarified - Solzhenitsyn seems to be balancing on the brink of the comic and the serious, seeing one of the bizarre and extraordinary forms of the Russian national character. Comical for all the meaninglessness of his life on the Field (the heroes even suspect that in this way Zakhar-Kalita is shirking hard rural work) is his claim to seriousness and self-importance, his complaints that he, the caretaker of the Field, is not given weapons. And next to this is the hero’s not at all comic passion to testify to the historical glory of Russian weapons in the ways available to him. And then “all the mocking and condescending things that we thought about him yesterday immediately disappeared. On this frosty morning, rising from the hay, he was no longer a Caretaker, but, as it were, the Spirit of this Field, guarding it and never leaving it.”
Of course, the distance between the narrator and the hero is enormous: the hero does not have access to the historical material with which the narrator freely operates; they belong to different cultural and social environment, but their true devotion brings them together national history and culture, belonging to which makes it possible to overcome social and cultural differences.
Turning to folk character in stories published in the first half of the 60s, Solzhenitsyn offers literature a new concept of personality. His heroes, such as Matryona, Ivan Denisovich (the image of the janitor Spiridon from the novel “In the First Circle” gravitates towards them), are people who do not reflect, living by certain natural, as if given from the outside, ideas developed in advance and not developed by them. And, following these ideas, it is important to survive physically in conditions that are not at all conducive to physical survival, but not at the cost of losing one’s own human dignity. To lose it means to die, that is, having survived physically, to cease to be a person, to lose not only the respect of others, but also respect for oneself, which is tantamount to death. Explaining this, so to speak, ethics of survival, Shukhov recalls the words of his first foreman Kuzemin: “In the camp, this is who is dying: who licks the bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather.”
With the image of Ivan Denisovich, a new ethics seemed to come into literature, forged in the camps through which a very large part of society passed. (Many pages of “The Gulag Archipelago” will be devoted to the study of this ethics.) Shukhov, not wanting to lose human dignity, is not at all inclined to take on all the blows of camp life - otherwise he simply will not survive. “That’s right, groan and rot,” he notes. “If you resist, you’ll break.” In this sense, the writer denies the generally accepted romantic ideas about the proud opposition of personality tragic circumstances, on which literature brought up a generation Soviet people 30s And in this sense, the contrast between Shukhov and the captain Buinovsky, a hero who takes the blow upon himself, is interesting, but often, as it seems to Ivan Denisovich, it is senseless and self-destructive. The protests of the captain against the morning search in the cold of people who have just woken up after getting up, shivering from the cold, are naive:
“Buinovsky - in the throat, he’s used to his destroyers, but he hasn’t been in the camp for three months:
You have no right to undress people in the cold! You don’t know the ninth article of the criminal code!..
They have. They know. This is something you, brother, don’t know yet.”
The purely folk, peasant practicality of Ivan Denisovich helps him survive and preserve himself as a man - without asking himself eternal questions, without trying to generalize the experience of his military and camp life, where he ended up after captivity (neither the investigator who interrogated Shukhov, nor he himself ever were able to figure out what kind of German intelligence task he was performing). He, of course, does not have access to the level of historical and philosophical generalization of the camp experience as a facet of the national-historical existence of the 20th century, which Solzhenitsyn himself embarked on in “The Gulag Archipelago.”
In the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn is faced with the creative task of combining two points of view - the author and the hero, points of view that are not opposite, but ideologically similar, but differing in the level of generalization and breadth of material. This task is solved almost exclusively by stylistic means, when there is a barely noticeable gap between the speech of the author and the character, sometimes increasing, sometimes almost disappearing.
Solzhenitsyn addresses in a fabulous manner a narrative that gives Ivan Denisovich the opportunity for verbal self-realization, but this is not a direct tale reproducing the hero’s speech, but introducing the image of a narrator whose position is close to that of the hero. This narrative form made it possible at some moments to distance the author and the hero, to make a direct conclusion of the narrative from the “author’s Shukhov” to the “author’s Solzhenitsyn’s” speech... By shifting the boundaries of Shukhov’s sense of life, the author gained the right to see what his hero could not see , something that is beyond Shukhov’s competence, while the relationship between the author’s speech plan and the hero’s plan can be shifted in the opposite direction - their points of view and their stylistic masks will immediately coincide. Thus, “the syntactic-stylistic structure of the story was formed as a result of the peculiar use of related possibilities of the tale, shifts from improperly direct to improperly authorial speech,” which are equally focused on conversational features Russian language.
Both the hero and the narrator (here is the obvious basis for their unity, expressed in the speech elements of the work) have access to that specifically Russian view of reality, which is usually called folk. It was the experience of a purely “peasant” perception of the camp as one of the aspects of Russian life in the 20th century. and paved the way for the story to reach the readers of Novy Mir and the entire country. Solzhenitsyn himself recalled this in “Telenok”:
“I won’t say that this is an exact plan, but I had a correct guess and presentiment: the top man Alexander Tvardovsky and the top man Nikita Khrushchev cannot remain indifferent to this man Ivan Denisovich. And so it came true: it was not even poetry and not even politics that decided the fate of my story, but this down-to-earth peasant essence of it, which has been ridiculed, trampled and reviled so much among us since the Great Turning Point, and even before that” (p. 27).
In the stories published then, Solzhenitsyn did not yet approach one of the most important topics for him - the topic of resistance to the anti-people regime. It will become one of the most important in the “GULAG Archipelago”. While the writer was interested in himself folk character and his existence “in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, lived,” in the very Russia that the narrator is looking for in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor.” But he finds it untouched by the turmoil of the 20th century. an island of natural Russian life, but a national character that managed to preserve itself in this turmoil. “There are such born angels,” the writer wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint,” as if characterizing Matryona, “they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even if their feet touch its surface? Each of us has met such people, there are not ten or a hundred of them in Russia, these are righteous people, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), took advantage of their goodness, in good moments responded to them in kind, they have a positive attitude, and immediately immersed themselves again to our doomed depths” (Publicism, vol. 1, p. 61). What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, spoken much later. She is outside the sphere of the heroic or exceptional, she realizes herself in the most ordinary, everyday situation, experiences all the “charms” of the Soviet rural novelty of the 50s: having worked all her life, she is forced to worry about a pension not for herself, but for husband, missing since the beginning of the war, walking kilometers and bowing to office desks. Unable to buy peat, which is mined all around but is not sold to collective farmers, she, like all her friends, is forced to take it secretly. In creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 50s. with her lack of rights and arrogant disregard for an ordinary, non-official person. Matryona's righteousness lies in her ability to preserve her humanity even in such inaccessible conditions.
But who does Matryona oppose, in other words, in a collision with what forces does her essence manifest itself? In an encounter with Thaddeus, a black old man who appears before the narrator, school teacher and Matryona’s lodger, on the threshold of her hut, when he came with a humiliating request for his grandson? He crossed this threshold forty years ago, with rage in his heart and an ax in his hands - his bride from the war did not wait, she married his brother. “I stood on the threshold,” says Matryona. - I’ll scream! I would throw myself at his knees! You can’t... Well, he says, if it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both up!”
According to some researchers, the story “Matrenin's Dvor” is hidden mystical.
Already at the very end of the story, after Matryona’s death, Solzhenitsyn lists her quiet advantages:
“Ununderstood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters, sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees...
We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very same farmer without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand.
Neither the city.
Neither the whole land is ours.”
And the highly dramatic ending of the story (Matryona dies under a train while helping Thaddeus transport the logs of her own hut) gives the ending a very special, symbolic meaning: she’s no longer there, so the village isn’t worth living without her? And the city? And all the land is ours?
In 1995-1999 Solzhenitsyn published new stories, which he called “two-part.” Their most important compositional principle is the opposition of the two parts, which makes it possible to compare two human destinies and characters that manifested themselves differently in the general context of historical circumstances. Their heroes - and people who seemed to have sunk into the abyss of Russian history and left a bright mark on it, such as, for example, Marshal G. K. Zhukov - are considered by the writer from a purely personal point of view, regardless of official regalia, if any available. The problematic of these stories is shaped by the conflict between history and the individual. The ways to resolve this conflict, no matter how different they may seem, always lead to the same result: a person who has lost faith and is disoriented in the historical space, a person who does not know how to sacrifice himself and makes a compromise, finds himself ground down and crushed by the terrible era in which he finds himself live.
Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov is a rural intellectual who saw the meaning of his life in serving the people, confident that “everyday assistance to the peasant in his current urgent needs, alleviation of the people’s needs in any real form" During the Civil War, Ektov saw no other option for himself, a populist and lover of the people, than to join the peasant insurgent movement led by Ataman Antonov. The most educated person among Antonov's associates, Ektov became his chief of staff. Solzhenitsyn shows the tragic zigzag in the fate of this generous and honest man, who inherited from the Russian intelligentsia the inescapable moral need to serve the people and share the peasant pain. But betrayed by the same peasants (“on the second night he was handed over to the security officers following a denunciation from a neighbor’s woman”), Ektov is broken by blackmail: he cannot find the strength to sacrifice his wife and daughter and commits a terrible crime, in fact, “surrendering” everything Antonov headquarters - those people to whom he came himself to share their pain, with whom he needed to be in hard times, so as not to hide in his hole in Tambov and not despise himself! Solzhenitsyn shows the fate of a crushed man who finds himself faced with an insoluble life equation and is not ready to solve it. He can put his life on the altar, but the life of his daughter and wife?.. Is a person even able to do such a thing? “The Bolsheviks used a great lever: taking families hostage.”
The conditions are such that even a person’s virtuous qualities turn against him. A bloody civil war squeezes a private person between two millstones, grinding his life, his destiny, his family, his moral convictions.
“Sacrifice his wife and Marinka (daughter - M.G.), step over them - how could he??
For who else in the world - or for what else in the world? - is he responsible more than for them?
Yes, the fullness of life - and they were.
And hand them over yourself? Who can do this?!”
The situation appears to the Ego as hopeless. The irreligious-humanistic tradition, dating back to the Renaissance era and directly denied by Solzhenitsyn in his Harvard speech, prevents a person from feeling his responsibility beyond his family. “The story “Ego,” says modern researcher P. Spivakovsky, “exactly shows how the irreligious-humanistic consciousness of the main character turns out to be a source of betrayal.” The hero's inattention to the sermons of the village priests is very characteristic the worldview of the Russian intellectual, to which Solzhenitsyn casually draws attention. After all, Ektov is a supporter of the “real”, material, practical activities, but focusing only on it alone, alas, leads to forgetting the spiritual meaning of life. Perhaps the church sermon, which the Ego arrogantly refuses, could be the source of “that very real help, without which the hero falls into the trap of his own worldview,” that same humanistic, irreligious, which does not allow the individual to feel his responsibility before God, but his own fate - as part of God's providence.
A person in the face of inhuman circumstances, changed, ground by them, unable to refuse a compromise and deprived of a Christian worldview, defenseless before the conditions of a forced transaction (can the Ego be judged for this?) - is another typical situation in our history.
Two traits of the Russian intellectual led Ego to a compromise: belonging to non-religious humanism and following the revolutionary-democratic tradition. But, paradoxically, the writer saw similar collisions in Zhukov’s life (the story “On the Edges,” paired with “Ego” in a two-part composition). The connection between his fate and the fate of Ego is surprising - both fought on the same front, only on opposite sides: Zhukov - on the side of the Reds, Ego - on the side of the rebel peasants. And Zhukov was wounded in this war with his own people, but, unlike the idealist Ego, he survived. In his history, full of ups and downs, in victories over the Germans and in painful defeats in apparatus games with Khrushchev, in the betrayal of people whom he himself once saved (Khrushchev - twice, Konev from the Stalinist tribunal in 1941), in the fearlessness of youth, In the commander’s cruelty, in the senile helplessness, Solzhenitsyn is trying to find the key to understanding this fate, the fate of the marshal, one of those Russian soldiers who, according to I. Brodsky, “bravely entered other people’s capitals, / but returned in fear to their own” (“ To the death of Zhukov”, 1974). In ups and downs, he sees weakness behind the iron will of the marshal, which manifested itself in a completely human tendency to compromise. And here is the continuation of the most important theme of Solzhenitsyn’s work, which began in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and reached its culmination in “The Gulag Archipelago”: this theme is connected with the study of the limits of compromise, which a person who wants not to lose himself must know. Crushed by heart attacks and strokes, senile infirmity, Zhukov appears at the end of the story - but this is not his problem, but in the next compromise (he inserted two or three phrases into the book of memoirs about the role of political instructor Brezhnev in the victory), which he made in order to see his book published. Compromise and indecision at turning points in life, the same fear that he experienced when returning to his capital, broke and finished off the marshal - in a different way than Ego, but essentially the same. The ego is helpless to change anything when it betrays terribly and cruelly. Zhukov, too, can only look back helplessly at the edge of life: “Perhaps even then, even then, I should have made up my mind? Oh, oh, it seems - he's been a fool, he's been a fool?..” The hero is not given the opportunity to understand that he made a mistake not when he did not decide on a military coup and did not become a Russian de Gaulle, but when he, peasant son, almost praying for his idol Tukhachevsky, participated in the destruction of the world of the Russian village that gave birth to him, when peasants were smoked out of the forests with gases, and “bandied” villages were burned down completely.
Stories about Ektov and Zhukov are addressed to destinies subjectively honest people, broken by the terrible historical circumstances of the Soviet era. But another version of a compromise with reality is also possible - complete and joyful submission to it and natural oblivion of any pangs of conscience. This is the story “ Apricot jam" The first part of this story is a terrible letter addressed to a living classic of Soviet literature. It is written by a semi-literate person who is quite clearly aware of the hopelessness of the Soviet clutches of life, from which he, the son of dispossessed parents, will no longer escape, having perished in labor camps:
“I am a slave in extreme circumstances, and I am destined to live like this until the last insult. Maybe it would be inexpensive for you to send me a grocery parcel? Have mercy..."
A food parcel - perhaps it contains the salvation of this man, Fyodor Ivanovich, who has become just a unit of the forced Soviet labor army, a unit whose life has no meaning at all significant price. The second part of the story is a description of the life of a beautiful dacha famous Writer, rich, warmed and caressed at the very top - a man happy from a successfully found compromise with the authorities, joyfully lying both in journalism and in literature. The Writer and the Critic, conducting literary and official conversations over tea, are in a different world than the entire Soviet country. The voice of a letter with words of truth that have flown into this world of rich writers' cottages cannot be heard by representatives of the literary elite: deafness is one of the conditions for a compromise with the authorities. The Writer’s delight at the fact that “a letter with a pristine language emerges from the depths of modern readers is the height of cynicism.<...>what a masterful, and at the same time captivating combination and control of words! The writer is envious too!” A letter that appeals to the conscience of a Russian writer (according to Solzhenitsyn, the hero of his story is not a Russian, but a Soviet writer) becomes only material for the study of non-standard speech patterns that help stylize folk speech, which is interpreted as exotic and subject to reproduction by a “folk” Writer, like would know national life from the inside. The highest degree of disdain for the cry of a tortured person heard in the letter is visible in the Writer’s remark when he is asked about his connection with the correspondent: “Why answer, the answer is not the point. It’s a matter of language discovery.”
With this article we open a series of articles dedicated to Nobel Prize laureates from Russia in the field of literature. We are interested in the question - for what, why and by what criteria is this award given, as well as why this award is not given to people who deserve it with their talent and achievements, for example, Leo Tolstoy and Dmitry Mendeleev.
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature from our country in different years steel: I. Bunin, B. Pasternak, M. Sholokhov, A. Solzhenitsyn, I. Brodsky. It should be noted that with the exception of M. Sholokhov, all the rest were emigrants and dissidents.
In this article we will talk about the 1970 Nobel Prize winner writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
WHO IS ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is known to the reader for his works “In the First Circle”, “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Cancer Ward”, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and others.
And this writer appeared on our heads, thanks to Khrushchev, for whom SoLZHENITSYN (even the word “lie” is present in the surname itself) became another tool for dealing with the Stalinist past, and nothing more.
The pioneer of the “artistic” lie about Stalin (with the personal support of Khrushchev) was the former camp informer Solzhenitsyn, elevated to the rank of Nobel laureate in literature (see the article “Vetrov, aka Solzhenitsyn” in the Military Historical Journal, 1990, No. 12 , p. 77), whose books were published in mass editions during the period of “perestroika” at the direction of the treacherous leadership of the country to destroy the USSR.
This is what Khrushchev himself writes in his memoirs:
I am proud that at one time I supported one of Solzhenitsyn’s first works... I don’t remember Solzhenitsyn’s biography. I was reported before that he spent a long time in the camps. In the story mentioned, he proceeded from his own observations. I read it. It leaves a heavy impression, disturbing, but truthful. And most importantly, it disgusts what happened under Stalin... Stalin was a criminal, and criminals must be condemned at least morally. The strongest judgment is to brand them work of art. Why, on the contrary, was Solzhenitsyn considered a criminal?
Why? Because the anti-Soviet graphomaniac Solzhenitsyn turned out to be a rare find for the West, which was rushed to in 1970 (even though given year was not chosen by chance - the year of the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin, as another attack on the USSR) to undeservedly award the author of “Ivan Denisovich” the Nobel Prize in Literature is an unprecedented fact. As Alexander Shabalov writes in the book “The Eleventh Strike of Comrade Stalin,” Solzhenitsyn begged for the Nobel Prize, declaring:
I need this bonus as a step up in position, in battle! And the sooner I get it, the harder I’ll become, the harder I’ll hit!
And, indeed, the name of Solzhenitsyn became the banner of the dissident movement in the USSR, which at one time played a huge negative role in the liquidation of the Soviet socialist system. And most of his opuses first saw the light “over the hill” with the support of Radio Liberty, the Russian department of the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the Russian department of the State Department, the department of agitation and propaganda of the Pentagon, and the information department of the British MI.
And having done his dirty deed, he was sent back to Russia, destroyed by the liberals. Because even our enemies don’t need such traitors. Where he grumbled with the air of a “prophet” on Russian television with his “dissenting opinion” “exposing” the mafia Yeltsin regime, which no longer interested anyone and could change absolutely nothing.
Let's take a closer look at the biography, creativity, and ideological views of the writer A. Solzhenitsyn.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk, into a Cossack family. The father, Isaac (that is, in fact, his patronymic is Isaakovich, that is, he lied to everyone, saying everywhere, including in writing, that he was Isaevich) Semenovich, died hunting six months before the birth of his son. Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak - from the family of a wealthy landowner.
In 1939, Solzhenitsyn entered the correspondence department of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (some sources indicate literary courses at Moscow State University). In 1941, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University (enrolled in 1936).
In October 1941 he was drafted into the army, and in 1942, after training at the artillery school in Kostroma, he was sent to the front as commander of a sound reconnaissance battery. Awarded with orders Patriotic War 2nd degree and Red Star.
The book written by Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, published in the Soviet Union, contains funny things: it turns out that in 1944-1945, Solzhenitsyn, being a Soviet officer, composed projects for the elimination of Stalin.
At the same time, he wrote his directives in letters and sent them to his friends. So he wrote directly - “Directive number one”, etc., and this is obvious madness, because then there was military censorship and every letter was stamped “Checked by military censorship.” For such letters then, in wartime, they were guaranteed to be arrested and therefore only a half-crazed person, or a person hoping that the letter would be read and sent from the front to the rear, could do such things. And these are not simple words.
The fact is that among the artillery batteries during the Great Patriotic War there were also instrumental reconnaissance batteries - sound metering, in one of which Solzhenitsyn served. This was the most reliable means of identifying enemy firing batteries. Sound meters deployed a system of microphones on the ground that received the acoustic wave from the shot, the signal was recorded and calculated, on the basis of which they obtained the coordinates of the enemy’s firing batteries, even in a battlefield heavily saturated with artillery. This made it possible, with good organization of troop control, to begin to suppress enemy batteries with artillery fire after one to three volleys of the enemy.
Therefore, sound recorders were valued, and in order to ensure the safety of their combat work, they were stationed in the near rear, and not on the front line, and especially not in the first line of trenches. They were placed so that they would not end up near objects that could be subject to enemy air raids and artillery shelling. During the retreat, they were among the first to be taken out of the battle area; during the offensive, they followed the first line troops. Those. While doing their important work, they came into direct contact with the enemy in a combat situation only in some emergency cases, and to counter him they had only small arms - carbines and personal weapons of officers.
However, A.I. Solzhenitsyn was “lucky”: the Germans hit him, the front rolled back, control of the troops was lost for some time - the opportunity to show heroism presented itself. But it was not he who showed heroism, but the battery sergeant-major, who saved it and led it to the rear. War is paradoxical. If we talk specifically about the sound-metric battery, then the foreman’s actions were correct: he saved equipment and qualified personnel from useless death in a battle for which the sound-metric battery was not intended. Why this was not done by its commander Solzhenitsyn, who appeared at the battery location later, is an open question: “the war was written off” (there was no time for such trifles).
But this episode was enough for A.I. Solzhenitsyn: he realized that in the war for socialism, which was alien to him (he himself came from a clan of not the last rich people in Russia, although not from the main branch: on the eve of the First World War, his uncle owned one of the nine Rolls- Royce” who were present in the empire) may be killed, and then the “idée fixe” will not be fulfilled - a dream from childhood: to enter the history of world literature as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy of the 20th century. So A.I. Solzhenitsyn fled from the front to the Gulag in order to be guaranteed to survive. And the fact that he pawned his friend is a trifle against the background of saving the precious life of the future “great writer.” On February 9, 1945, he was arrested and on July 27 sentenced to 8 years in forced labor camps.
Natalya Reshetovskaya further describes Solzhenitsyn's arrest, where she was interrogated as a witness, and other people were also interrogated. One of the witnesses, a sailor, a young midshipman, testified that Solzhenitsyn accidentally met him on the train and immediately began to engage in anti-Stalin propaganda. To the investigator’s question: “Why didn’t you report it right away?” The midshipman replied that he immediately realized that in front of him was a madman. That's why I didn't report it.
He stayed in the camps from 1945 to 1953: in New Jerusalem near Moscow; in the so-called “sharashka” - a secret research institute in the village of Marfino near Moscow; in 1950 - 1953 he was imprisoned in one of the Kazakh camps.
In February 1953 he was released without the right to reside in the European part of the USSR and sent to “eternal settlement” (1953 - 1956); lived in the village of Kok-Terek, Dzhambul region (Kazakhstan).
On February 3, 1956, by decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated and moved to Ryazan. Worked as a mathematics teacher.
In 1962, in the magazine " New world", with the special permission of N.S. Khrushchev (!!!, which says a lot), the first story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was published - “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” (the story “Shch-854. One day of one prisoner” was rewritten at the request of the editors "). The story was nominated for the Lenin Prize, which caused active resistance from the communist authorities.
In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev, the ideological inspirer and patron of A. Solzhenitsyn, was removed from power, after which Solzhenitsyn’s “star” in the USSR began to fade.
In September 1965, the so-called Solzhenitsyn archive came to the Committee state security(KGB) and by order of the authorities, further publication of his works in the USSR was stopped: already published works were confiscated from libraries, and new books began to be published through “samizdat” channels and abroad.
In November 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but refused to travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony, fearing that the authorities would not allow him back to the USSR. In 1974, after the publication of the book “The Gulag Archipelago” in Paris (in the USSR, one of the manuscripts was seized by the KGB in September 1973, and in December 1973 the publication took place in Paris, which leads to interesting thoughts, given the fact that the head of the KGB at that time was Yu.V. Andropov, about whom we wrote in this article - http://inance.ru/2015/06/andropov/), the dissident writer was arrested. On February 12, 1974, a trial took place: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was found guilty of high treason, deprived of citizenship and sentenced to deportation from the USSR the next day.
Since 1974, Solzhenitsyn lived in Germany, in Switzerland (Zurich), and since 1976 in the USA (near the city of Cavendish, Vermont). Despite the fact that Solzhenitsyn lived in the United States for about 20 years, he did not ask for American citizenship. He rarely communicated with representatives of the press and the public, which is why he was known as a “Vermont recluse.” He criticized both the Soviet order and American reality. Over 20 years of emigration in Germany, the USA and France, he published a large number of works.
In the USSR, Solzhenitsyn's works began to be published only in the late 1980s. In 1989, in the same magazine “New World”, where “One Day...” was published, the first official publication of excerpts from the novel “The Gulag Archipelago” took place. On August 16, 1990, by decree of the President of the USSR, the Soviet citizenship of Alexander Isaevich (?) Solzhenitsyn was restored. In 1990, for his book “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn was awarded the State Prize (of course, awarded by liberals who hated Soviet power). On May 27, 1994, the writer returned to Russia. In 1997 elected full member of the Academy of Sciences Russian Federation.
WHO ARE YOU, ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN - “THE GREAT WRITER” OR “THE GREAT TRAITOR” OF OUR HOMELAND?
The name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn has always caused a lot of heated debate and discussion. Some call him and have called him a great Russian writer and active social activist, others call him a falsifier of historical facts and a detractor of the Motherland. However, the truth is probably out there somewhere. The casket opens very simply: Khrushchev needed a scribbler who, without a twinge of conscience, could denigrate the successes that were achieved during the reign of Joseph Stalin. It turned out to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
For almost 20 years, Russian liberal ministers and officials openly called Solzhenitsyn to his face a great Russian writer. And he, even for the sake of decency, never objected to this. Likewise, he did not protest against the titles “Leo Tolstoy of the 20th century” and “Dostoevsky of the 20th century.” Alexander Isaevich modestly called himself “Antilenin.”
True, the true title of “great writer” in Russia was awarded only by Time. And, apparently, Time has already pronounced its verdict. It is curious that the lives of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov are known quite well to literary scholars and historians. And if they argue about something, it’s over some points.
The reader can easily find out why, when and how our writers were subjected to government repression. When and in what editions were their books published? What was the real success (salesability) of these books? What kind of royalties did the authors receive? For example, with what funds did Chekhov buy the Melikhovo estate? Well, Solzhenitsyn’s life is full of scandals, outrageousness, triumphs and a sea of white spots, and precisely at the most turning points of his biography.
But in 1974 Solzhenitsyn found himself not just anywhere, but in Switzerland, and then in April 1976 in the USA. Well, in the “free world” you don’t have to hide from the public and journalists. But even there, Solzhenitsyn’s life is known only in fragments. For example, in the summer of 1974, using royalties from the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn created Russian public fund assistance to the persecuted and their families" to help political prisoners in the USSR (parcels and money transfers to places of detention, legal and illegal financial assistance to the families of prisoners).
"Archipelago" was published in a circulation of 50 thousand copies. The Soviet media at that time made jokes about the illiquid deposits of Solzhenitsyn’s books in Western bookstores. One of the secrets of Solzhenitsyn and the CIA is the ratio of copies of Solzhenitsyn’s books sold to the number of destroyed.
Well, okay, let's assume that all 50 thousand were sold. But what was the fee? Unknown.
It is curious that in the United States at the end of the twentieth century they came up with an analogue of the Soviet “Union of Writers” with its literary fund. That is, the writer teaches somewhere - at universities or in some training centers for aspiring writers. In this way, there is “feeding” of those who write works that are pleasing to Western states and business.
But Solzhenitsyn, unlike Yevtushenko and many others, did not teach anywhere. However, in 1976, he purchased an expensive 50-acre (!) estate in Vermont. Along with the estate, a large wooden house with furniture and other equipment. Nearby, Solzhenitsyn is building “for work” a large three-story house and a number of other buildings.
Solzhenitsyn's sons study in expensive private schools. Alexander Isaakovich (let's call him correctly) maintains a large staff of servants (!) and security guards. Naturally, their number and payment are unknown, if not classified. However, some eyewitnesses saw two karate champions on duty around the clock in his apartment in Switzerland.
But maybe rich Russian emigrants helped Solzhenitsyn? No! On the contrary, he helps everyone himself, establishes foundations, runs newspapers, such as Our Country in Buenos Aires.
“Where is the money, Zin?”
Oh! Nobel Prize! And here again the “top secret”: I received the award, but how much and where did it go?
The 1970 Nobel Prize was awarded to A. Solzhenitsyn - "For the moral strength gleaned from the tradition of great Russian literature" which he was awarded in 1974.
For comparison, Mikhail Sholokhov, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, received 62 thousand dollars in 1965 (it is known what he spent on - on the improvement of his native village of Vyoshenskaya). This is not even enough to buy an estate and build a house. And Alexander Isaakovich didn’t seem to be involved in business. So our “new Tolstoy” lived without Yasnaya Polyana and Mikhailovsky, but much richer than Lev Nikolaevich and Alexander Sergeevich. So who supported “our” “great writer”?
SOLZHENITSYN'S ANTI-PATRIOTISM
In May 1974, Solzhenitsyn said:
I will go to the USA, I will speak in the Senate, I will talk with the president, I want to destroy Fulbright and all the senators who intend to make agreements with the communists. I must get the Americans to increase pressure in Vietnam.
And so Solzhenitsyn proposes to “increase the pressure.” Kill a couple more million Vietnamese or start a thermonuclear war? Let's not forget that over 60 thousand Soviet military personnel and several hundred civilian specialists fought in Vietnam.
And Alexander Isaakovich shouted: “Come on! Let's!"
By the way, he several times called on the United States to destroy communism through nuclear war. Solzhenitsyn publicly stated:
The course of history has entrusted the leadership of the world to the United States.
Solzhenitsyn congratulated General Pinochet, who carried out a coup d'etat in Chile and killed thousands of people without trial in stadiums in Santiago. Alexander Isaakovich sincerely mourned the death of the fascist dictator Franco and called on the new Spanish authorities not to rush to democratize the country.
Solzhenitsyn angrily denounced American presidents Nixon and Ford for indulging and making concessions to the USSR. They say they are “not actively interfering in the internal affairs of the USSR” and that “the Soviet people are left to the mercy of fate.”
Intervene, Solzhenitsyn urged, Intervene again and again as much as you can.
In 1990 (by the new liberal authorities), Solzhenitsyn was restored to Soviet citizenship with the subsequent termination of the criminal case, and in December of the same year he was awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR for “The Gulag Archipelago.” According to the story of the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, Vyacheslav Kostikov, during B. N. Yeltsin’s first official visit to the United States in 1992, immediately upon his arrival in Washington, Boris Nikolayevich called Solzhenitsyn from the hotel and had a “long” conversation with him, in particular, about the Kuril Islands.
As Kostikov testified, the writer’s opinion was unexpected and shocking to many:
I studied the entire history of the islands from the 12th century. These are not our islands, Boris Nikolaevich. Need to give it away. But expensive...
But perhaps Solzhenitsyn’s interlocutors and journalists misquoted or misunderstood our great patriot? Alas, having returned to Russia, Solzhenitsyn did not renounce any of the words he had previously spoken. So, he wrote in “Archipelago” and other places about 60 million prisoners in the Gulag, then about 100 million. But, having arrived, he could find out from various declassified sources that from 1918 to 1990 in Soviet Russia was repressed by political reasons 3.7 million people. Dissident Zhores Medvedev, who wrote about 40 million prisoners, publicly admitted the mistake and apologized, but Solzhenitsyn did not.
A writer, like any citizen, has the right to speak out against the existing government. You can hate Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Putin, but at the same time not go over to the side of Russia’s enemies. Pushkin wrote offensive poems about Alexander I and was exiled. Dostoevsky participated in an anti-government conspiracy and went to hard labor. But in 1831, Alexander Sergeevich, without hesitation, wrote “Slanderers of Russia,” and Fyodor Mikhailovich, on the eve of the 1877 war, wrote the article “And once again that Constantinople, sooner or later, must be ours.” None of them betrayed their country.
And now in schools, between the portraits of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, portraits of Solzhenitsyn are hung. Shouldn't we go even further and hang portraits of Grishka Otrepiev, Hetman Mazepa and General Vlasov (the latter was considered a hero by A. Solzhenitsyn) in classrooms?
End of the article here:
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. After tragic death father, in 1924 Solzhenitsyn moved with his mother to Rostov-on-Don, from 1926 to 1936 he studied at school, living in poverty.
IN junior classes was subjected to ridicule for wearing a cross and unwillingness to join the pioneers, and was reprimanded for attending church. Under the influence of the school, he sincerely accepted the communist ideology, and in 1936 he joined the Komsomol. In high school, I became interested in literature and began writing essays and poems; interested in history and social life. In 1937 he conceived a “great novel about the revolution” of 1917.
In 1936 he entered Rostov State University. Not wanting to make literature my main specialty, I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. At the university he studied with excellent grades (a Stalin scholarship holder), continued literary exercises, and in addition to university studies, he independently studied history and Marxism-Leninism. He graduated from the university in 1941 with honors.
Alexander, after graduating from school and receiving an education at Rostov University, decided to devote himself to literature and came to the capital for this. He wanted to enter Moscow University, get a second education, and become a teacher. But the Great Patriotic War began. 1942
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Solzhenitsyn was not immediately mobilized, since he was considered “limitedly fit” for health reasons. He actively sought a call to the front.
He sought assignment to an officer's school, and in April 1942 he was sent to an artillery school in Kostroma; in November 1942, he was released as a lieutenant and sent to Saransk, where a reserve regiment was located to form artillery instrumental reconnaissance divisions.
In the active army since February 1943.
And here he is, the son of Russia, already the commander of the sound reconnaissance battery of the 794th Separate Army Reconnaissance Artillery Division of the 2nd Belorussian Front, decisive, never giving up, persistent and stubborn.
In this position he was continuously at the front until February 1945. The combat route is from Orel to East Prussia. In November 1943 he received the rank of senior lieutenant, in June 1944 - captain. At the front, he kept war diaries, wrote a lot, and sent his works to Moscow writers for review. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War and the Red Star, but did not have time to receive them.
At the front, Solzhenitsyn continued to be interested in public life, but became critical of Stalin (for “distorting Leninism”); in correspondence with an old friend (Nikolai Vitkevich), he spoke abusively about “Godfather,” by whom Stalin was guessed, kept in his personal belongings a “resolution” drawn up together with Vitkevich, in which he compared the Stalinist order with serfdom and spoke about the creation of an “organization” after the war to restore the so-called “Leninist” norms. The letters aroused suspicion of military censorship, and in February 1945 Solzhenitsyn and Vitkevich were arrested
“The black emka delivered Captain Solzhenitsyn to headquarters,” according to the memoirs of Natalya Reshetovskaya. “You are under arrest.”
Moscow. Lubyanka. “Eight years of forced labor camps under articles 58-10 and 58-11, according to the resolution of the OSO NKVD of July 7, 1945.”
In June 1946, he was demanded into the special prison system of the 4th Special Department of the NKVD, in September he was sent to a special institute for prisoners (“sharashka”) at the aircraft engine plant in Rybinsk, five months later - to the “sharashka” in Zagorsk, in July 1947 - to a similar establishment in Marfino (near Moscow). He worked in his specialty as a mathematician.
In May 1950, due to a disagreement with the leadership of the Sharashka, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to Butyrki, and in August he was sent to Steplag, a special camp in Ekibastuz. Alexander Isaevich served almost a third of his prison camp term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - in the north of Kazakhstan. In the camp I worked in “general” work, for some time as a foreman, and took part in a strike.
These experiences greatly undermine Alexander's health. In the winter of 1952, Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer and was operated on in the camp. But he does not despair, because the end of his sentence, the end of his torment is soon. Released on February 13, 1953.
And here he is, the martyr son.
Lord, what Solzhenitsyn had to go through over the years! Everything: the number Shch-262, and the 3653 days of martyrdom, and the bullying of the guards, and the contempt of his relatives, and the divorce from his beloved wife - he will never forget. In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn became completely disillusioned with Marxism, over time he believed in God and leaned toward Orthodox patriotic ideas.
In August 1956, Solzhenitsyn returned from exile to Central Russia. Lives in the village of Miltsevo (Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region), where for two years he teaches mathematics at a village school and lives in the house of the peasant woman Matryona Zakharova, about whom he later wrote famous story"Matrenin's yard"
The author's title of the story is “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” - based on a Russian proverb. The story began at the end of July - beginning of August 1959 in the village of Chernomorskoye in western Crimea, where Solzhenitsyn was invited by friends through exile in Kazakhstan. The story was completed in December of the same year, and in 1963 it was published in the New World magazine. This story, as the author himself noted, is “completely autobiographical and reliable,” the narrator’s patronymic, Ignatich, is consonant with Solzhenitsyn’s patronymic, Isaevich.
Andrei Sinyavsky called this work the “fundamental thing” of all Russian “village” literature.
“In the summer of 1956, I was returning from the dusty hot desert - just to Russia. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most visceral Russia - if such a thing existed somewhere, lived,” - this is how Solzhenitsyn recalls his most long-awaited moments in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor.”
Who to give yourself to? What should I dedicate myself to? And then such a “interior Russia” was found - this is Matrenin’s yard.
Solzhenitsyn did not stay here long - only one academic year, but was able to see the whole life of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova, disfigured and crippled by power. I was able to comprehend the holiness of the soul that makes Matryona a person of the future.
Russia is rich not only in boundless open spaces, fertile lands, orchards, but also in extraordinary people, righteous people, gifted with pure, divine energy. They look at us with clear, deep eyes, as if they are looking into our souls, so much so that you can’t hide anything from them. The righteous sacrifice many of life's delights for the sake of purity of soul, and joyfully help those around them to overcome all adversity with dignity, emerge victorious from the struggle with themselves, and become spiritually cleansed. And no matter what they say about them, no matter how much one is surprised at their unpretentiousness, there will always be a place for such people on Russian soil, for they preach the truth.
Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of the Russian peasant woman. She resembles the biblical heroine Mary. Her appearance is like an icon, her life is like the life of a saint. Her house is pass-through symbolic image story - like the ark of the biblical righteous Noah, in which he is saved from the flood along with his family and pairs of all earthly animals in order to continue the human race. Matryona is a righteous woman. But her fellow villagers do not know about her hidden holiness; they consider the woman simply stupid, although it is she who preserves the highest features of Russian spirituality. Matryona did not complain about her life, she did not bother God, because he already knows what she needs. The life of a saint must end with a happy death, uniting her with God. However, the death of the heroine is bitterly absurd.
The death of the heroine symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived. The righteous peasant woman lived surrounded by unfriendly and selfish collective farmers. Their miserable and unhappy fate was not much different from the existence of camp prisoners. They lived according to traditional customs.
The story “Matrenin's Dvor” is impossible to read without tears. This sad story of a righteous peasant woman is not the author’s fiction. Solzhenitsyn trusts life and its creator - God - more than artistic fiction. That is why the story is read with such empathy and pride: after all, there are still righteous people left on Russian land, without whom neither a village, nor a city, nor our entire land would stand.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova spoke about “Matryona’s Yard” as follows:
“Yes, it’s an amazing thing, it’s amazing how they could publish it. It’s worse than “Ivan Denisovich.” There you can blame everything on a cult of personality, but here it’s not Matryona, but the whole Russian village that was hit by a steam locomotive and to pieces. The little things are also amazing. Remember - the old man’s black eyebrows, like two bridges meeting each other?. Have you noticed: his benches and stools are sometimes alive, sometimes dead? And are the cockroaches rustling under the wallpaper? Do you remember? Like the distant sound of the ocean! and the wallpaper moves in waves. And what a wonderful page when he suddenly sees Matryona young and sees the whole village young, that is, as it was before the general ruin.”
As in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”, in “Zakhara-Kalita” an important problem is raised: people do not feel like masters, the system turns a person into a “cog”. No power is needed, only the power of conscience. And although Zakhar is sometimes grumpy, distrustful, and sees a pest in everyone he meets, he does his job honestly, his soul cares for a place that is sacred to the Russian people, the memory of which every generation must pass on to its descendants.
What does he get for it?
“Twenty-seven rubles,” when “the minimum is thirty.”
Wow, what Russia has come to!
And Solzhenitsyn is still tormented because he is unable to open people’s eyes to what is happening in Russia
The era of Stalinism became one of the most terrible periods in the history of our country. The totalitarian regime subjugated the will, feelings, freedom and even the life of the common man. Our Motherland was imprisoned in one large camp, where innocent people languished and suffered. The system of human suppression turned the inhabitants of a great country into cogs in a merciless Stalinist machine.
Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire essence of the totalitarian system in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” about the life of the Gulag. It was conceived during general work in the Ekibastuz special camp in the winter of 1950-1951.
“In 1950, on some long winter camp day, I was carrying a stretcher with my partner and thought: how to describe our whole camp life? In fact, it is enough to describe just one day in detail, in the smallest detail, moreover, the day of the simplest worker, and our whole life will be reflected here. And there is no need to intensify any horrors, it is not necessary for this to be some kind of special day, but an ordinary one, this is the very day from which years are formed. I thought like this, and this idea remained in my mind, I didn’t touch it for nine years, and only in 1959, nine years later, I sat down and wrote it. I didn’t write it for long, just about forty days, less than a month and a half. It always turns out like this if you write from a dense life, the way of life of which you know too much, and not only that you don’t have to guess at something, try to understand something, but you just fight off unnecessary material, just so that the unnecessary doesn’t creep in , but to accommodate the most necessary things,” recalls Solzhenitsyn. The author believes that it is necessary to show one day of one unremarkable prisoner. “And everything will be,” adds Solzhenitsyn.
The story was written in 1959 in Ryazan, where he was then a teacher of physics and astronomy at school and was actively involved in creativity.
The image of Ivan Denisovich was formed from the appearance and habits of the soldier Shukhov, who fought in Solzhenitsyn’s battery during the Soviet-German war (but was never imprisoned), from the general experience of the post-war flow of “prisoners” and the author’s personal experience in the Special Camp as a mason. The rest of the characters in the story are all taken from camp life, with their true biographies.
In his work, Solzhenitsyn reveals the horror of the totalitarian system using the example of the most ordinary camp, which does not stand out among others. The main character of the story, Shukhov, is also a typical camp inmate; with the same typical fate. But this simplicity and routine makes the picture depicted by Solzhenitsyn become extremely realistic and scary. The story recreates the tragedy of an entire country, all of whose peoples experience the cruelty of totalitarianism. In the camp there are Estonian fishermen, a Latvian mason, a Ukrainian peasant, a resident Russian outback Shukhov. Solzhenitsyn is keen to emphasize that this tragedy affected all levels of society. In one barrack live the Moscow film director Tsezar Markovich, captain of the second rank Buinovsky, director of a large enterprise Fetyukov, peasant Shukhov, and bricklayer Kildigs. The system is merciless to everyone without exception.
In the Gulag there is a sophisticated system of suppressing everything human in people. It is impossible to calmly read about how much abuse each prisoner endures. A person's life under a camp regime often depends only on the mood of the guard. Prisoners are deprived of the most basic rights; they are trying to turn them into a faceless gray mass. A person in a camp is deprived of the right even to proper name and last name. Instead, each camp inmate has a number. The number is a mark that any one of those who ended up in Stalin’s camps has. The prisoner here waits every second for something terrible, disastrous for himself. Not everyone can withstand this, many break, but most try to maintain a human face in the camp. What bitter but courageous words the first foreman of Ivan Denisovich speaks: “Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too.” That’s why they hate so much in the camp the informers who buy their right to life at the cost of the suffering of others. People like Fetyukov, who licks the bowls in the dining room, are surrounded with contempt. People are deliberately turned into a herd, but people resist. He knows that no one has ever left the camp walls. When a prisoner's sentence expired, he was given a new one. However, people cannot live without hope, without faith in themselves.
The heroes of Solzhenitsyn’s story do not deserve even a thousandth of what the totalitarian regime does to them. It is enough to remember with what passion Ivan Denisovich and Kildigs carry out the laying of a working man. They were simply not used to working poorly, but at first such workers all over the country pulled wire to fence off the place of future work. This is exactly what the prisoners do when they build the Social Town in the snowy taiga. This is the kind of “socialism” the totalitarian system has prepared for the people!
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov lived that day happily. Such is the fate of a person in a state where happiness is an extra portion of gruel and a little tobacco. Shukhov went to work sick, but did not die; he could have ended up in a punishment cell, but he did not. Solzhenitsyn writes: “Shukhov fell asleep completely satisfied. He had a lot of luck today.” Ivan Denisovich’s luck cannot be understood by thinking about that time from the perspective of today. You need to feel the terrible meaning of the phrase: “The day passed, unclouded, almost happy.” Nothing terrible or cruel happened to the person, so the day can be called happy. One day in Shukhov’s life is the embodiment of the fate of the entire unfortunate country in the era of totalitarianism.
Solzhenitsyn's story is deeply true. It was written by a man who knew the life of the Gulag well, who shared the common tragedy of the entire people. The inhuman totalitarian system is revealed to us in all its barbarity.
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky called “Ivan Denisovich” a “literary miracle” in his internal review: “With this story a very strong, original and mature writer entered literature”; "a wonderful depiction of camp life under Stalin."
And indeed, it was not only Word and Deed. The story, published in the magazine “New World” in 1962, brought him worldwide fame and was a sensational success. Soon after the story was published, Solzhenitsyn was accepted into the USSR Writers' Union. All Soviet newspapers published laudatory reviews for several months, comparing the writer with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And even his book was nominated for the Lenin Prize for 1964 (as a result of a vote of the Prize Committee, the proposal was rejected). But that’s where the writer’s official success, which began so quickly, ended. Seeing the effect produced by “Ivan Denisovich” among the people, the authorities began to urgently call the quits. The danger for the authorities was in the scale of the writer’s talent, in the moral impact of “Ivan Denisovich” on readers. The image of a rural Russian peasant rose from the pages of the story as a generalized image of the people and, without letting go, appealed to human conscience, to responsibility for the great crime and to repentance.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, after reading the story, said to Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: “Every citizen of all two hundred million citizens of the Soviet Union must read and memorize this story.” Yes, this story is truly a great literary heritage!
Solzhenitsyn's stories stood out sharply against the background of the works of that time for their artistic merit and civic courage. This was emphasized by many at that time, including writers and poets.
The fact is that in Russia Solzhenitsyn could not be just a man with his own worldview, living according to the laws of his God. No, he is obliged to expel Him from his soul, and into the resulting emptiness, move Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin into the resulting emptiness, like into a communal apartment, and turn them into his religion. And he couldn't do that.
“So the circle is closed? And there really is no way out?” But the author believes that “the simplest, most accessible key to our liberation is personal non-participation in lies! Let the lie cover everything, let the lie control everything, but at the very beginning we will be stubborn: let it rule not through me.”
He believes, but with every step he feels the day of expulsion from the Writers' Union approaching. And he knows that after this there will come powerlessness and defenselessness. Indeed, in 1969 Solzhenitsyn was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was not awarded to him, but soon after that he was expelled from the Union of Writers of the USSR. After his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn began to openly declare his Orthodox patriotic beliefs and sharply criticize the authorities.
Reading into the memoirs of Galina Vishnevskaya: “I go into the house on the bed in the bedroom, there is some kind of knot lying. What kind of knot is this? It turns out that this is an old black padded jacket, quilted like a camp jacket, worn to holes.”
Is this really how Alexander Isaevich carries his precious property from place to place, never parting with it, and, having gone through his hard labor, does not allow himself to forget it?
His past path was immediately clearly presented, and aching pity for this great man filled his soul.
God grant, even like Solzhenitsyn, to be a martyr, but to remain a persistent man, the son of a not always just Russia, because Alexander Isaevich “can be brought to his knees, like Ivan Denisovich, but it is difficult to humiliate.”
It’s difficult, but they tried! They tried to “kick him out” from Russian literature, they tried to shut his mouth, but he found a way out. A way out that helped Solzhenitsyn continue his activities. He emigrated. And there - a warm welcome, recognition and the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to him in 1970 “for the moral strength with which he followed the immutable traditions of Russian literature” (proposed by Francois Mauriac).
He was also awarded the Templeton Prize in 1983 “for progress in the development of religion.”
In April 1976, he and his family moved to the United States and settled in the town of Cavendish (Vermont). He continued to be creative and rarely communicated with representatives of the press and the public, which is why he became known as a “Vermont recluse.”
But it’s a shame for Russia. Because his works appeared for the first time there, abroad.
Russia, why? Why are you doing this to your son? For what? He was just trying to open people's eyes. I tried and I succeeded. I was able to, but far from the Motherland, far from us. And now lines from his works “The Gulag Archipelago”, “In the First Circle”, “Cancer Ward” reach us, like lines from life:
What does this mean – standing for the truth!
Sit for the truth!
And finally, Russia realized her mistake, she realized that she had committed stupidity by rejecting her son, the great son of Russia.
With the advent of perestroika, the official attitude in the USSR towards Solzhenitsyn’s work and activities began to change, and many of his works were published.
On September 18, 1990, simultaneously in Literaturnaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda“An article by Solzhenitsyn was published about the ways of reviving the country, about the reasonable, in his opinion, foundations for building the life of the people and the state - “How can we develop Russia? Strong considerations." The article developed Solzhenitsyn’s long-standing thoughts, expressed earlier in his “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union,” the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint as Categories of National Life,” and other prose and journalistic works. Solzhenitsyn donated the royalties for this article to the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The article generated a huge number of responses.
In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was restored to Soviet citizenship.
Together with his family, he returned to his homeland on May 27, 1994, flying from the USA to Vladivostok, traveling by train across the country and ending the trip in the capital. Performed in State Duma RF. In 1997 he was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Russia tried to return Solzhenitsyn to his homeland, restore his good name and present him with a high award, but Solzhenitsyn refused all honors. Thus, in 1998 he was awarded the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called - for outstanding services to the Fatherland and great contribution to world literature, however, he refused the award: “I cannot accept the award from the supreme power that brought Russia to its current disastrous state.” This is his greatness, the greatness of one for whom fame is not important, but understanding and love are important. This is what Russia needs too.
He was also awarded the Great Gold Medal named after M.V. Lomonosov of the Russian Academy of Sciences - for his outstanding contribution to the development of Russian literature, Russian language and Russian history (1998).
Awarded the Grand Prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (2000), the Order of St. Sava, 1st degree (the highest award of the Serbian Orthodox Church; awarded on November 16, 2004), State Prize of the Russian Federation for outstanding achievements in the field of humanitarian activities (2006).
On June 12, 2007, President Vladimir Putin visited Solzhenitsyn and congratulated him on being awarded the State Prize.
Awarded the Zivko and Milica Topalović Foundation Prize (Serbia) 2007 (presented on March 7, 2008): “to the great writer and humanist whose Christian truthfulness gives us courage and consolation”, Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Romania (2008, posthumously).
Soon after the writer returned to the country, the annual Alexander Solzhenitsyn literary prize was established in 1997, the laureates of which were famous scientists, writers, filmmakers, “whose work has high artistic merit, contributes to self-knowledge of Russia, makes a significant contribution to the preservation and careful development of the traditions of the Russian literature."
He spent the last years of his life in Moscow and at a dacha near Moscow. Shortly before his death he was ill, but continued to study creative activity. Together with his wife Natalya Dmitrievna, president of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Foundation, he worked on the preparation and publication of his most complete 30-volume collected works. After a major operation he underwent, only his right hand was functional.
“One defeated hero was lying face down on the top of his head - native land, dropping the daring head on her, scattering his arms and legs in oblique fathoms. There was sorrow in his proneness.” This is a wonderful image of the great son of Russia.
So who is it? Eternal Zakhar-Kalita? Or maybe the eternal Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, from whom they could not take away the immortality to which he is doomed?
The enormous significance of Solzhenitsyn as a writer and person in the history of the Russian state, respect and sincere love for him are confirmed in various reviews, assessments of the writer’s creativity and activities.
Literary critic Lev Anninsky: “In the place of the writer, it’s not enough to say - a historian, but also a prophet, and also a political practitioner: the work was launched like a battering ram into totalitarian state. And if so, then the responsibility is different. Tolstoy pierced Russia " Caucasian prisoner", but he was not responsible for the outcome Caucasian War. The author of the Gulag, who by all accounts almost single-handedly overthrew the System, had to answer. For the collapse of a great state. For the collapse of the Union. For the rampant passions that led to this. How to answer when you yourself are horrified by this collapse, and also by Western democracy, according to whose patterns all this was cut. To give advice? He gave - elementary in essence and difficult to implement in the practice of a crazy age: to live not by lies, to equip the country from below, to change the geopolitical vector from the southwest to the northeast and, moreover, to save the people, instilling in them self-restraint. The country politely listened to the prophet - both the exiled one and the one who returned, greeted with delight, but the country could not get rid of that inescapable spiritual “revelry”, after which the ruins have to be rebuilt anew.”
Valentin Rasputin: “He was a truly powerful figure. Both in literature and in public life he was one of the most powerful figures in the entire history of Russia. Now that he is gone, this is understood especially. One man challenged a huge system - and won. No one, be it the most famous personalities in art, science and politics, there was no such enormous lifetime fame and popularity as Alexander Isaevich. These days, the whole world should gasp in sorrow - a great moralist, fair man, and talent is gone.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, first president of the USSR: “His books - “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “The Gulag Archipelago” - these are the books that helped people see what this regime really meant. We should be grateful to Alexander Isaevich for his contribution to making our country free and democratic. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - great person, who was one of the first to raise his voice against the Stalinist regime in defense of the people who were its victims. Few can compare with him in what he accomplished in his life.”
Yuri Lyubimov, director: “Solzhenitsyn was the criterion of our life, he was our Homer. The entire biography of Alexander Isaevich speaks of his extraordinary courage. Having gone through camps and terrible trials, he did not lose hope and faith in a better life for Russia. Until the end, he maintained clarity of mind and, despite a serious illness, until the last minute he continued to think, compose and write about “how to better develop Russia.”
In conclusion, I came to certain conclusions.
Alexander Isaevich in his works told us the cruel truth about the history of the state in which we live. There are no works left in either Russian or world literature that would pose a great danger to the Soviet regime. These books revealed his entire essence. The veil of lies and self-deception that still obscured the eyes of many of our fellow citizens was subsiding.
The twentieth century has come to its end. It was probably the most rapid and unique century in the entire history of mankind. The writer showed us all the instability and complexity of the relationship between man and the state. But the man managed to survive and gain hope for the future.
Why does Solzhenitsyn’s work attract me? Insight, truthfulness, expressed in the boundless filial love for the Motherland, in the way his soul aches for everything that happens in Russia. A writer, a historian, he always warns us: don’t get lost in history. “They will tell us: what can literature do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? And let’s not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is certainly intertwined with lies,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “but we need to take a simple step: do not participate in lies. Let this come into the world and even reign in the world, but not through me. More is available to writers and artists: defeat lies! I believe that Solzhenitsyn was the kind of writer who defeated lies.
Alexander Isaevich valued time very much. He often repeated: “Every day you must imprint your actions on the path of life.” His actions, his imprints on life path ran across the entire planet. The national Russian writer has long become a planetary writer, whose surname echoes the name Russia in all parts of the globe.
In his work, and in particular in the works “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn touches on various problems: the problem of respect, the problem of compassion, the problem of relations between a person and the state, or rather between the individual and society, the problem of attitudes towards work, the problem of justice and injustice .
In the work “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the prisoner is called by name and patronymic, although each had numbers. Why was this? Because people respected Ivan Denisovich. Respected for the fact that difficult situation was able to remain human, was able to retain all his moral principles, because he sympathized and helped others, because he tried to make life as comfortable as possible (hiding pieces of bread, trying to earn extra money during non-working hours), but was not an opportunist. In the camp they said: “...the one who dies is the one who licks the bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather’s door. “Ivan Denisovich never did any of this. And Matryona, on the contrary, was not respected in the village. Neighbors and relatives took her help for granted and did not understand all her spiritual depth. Ushakov’s dictionary says: “Compassion is sympathy for someone else’s suffering, participation aroused by the grief and misfortune of another person.” Matryona, from the story “Matryona’s Dvor,” was able to go through all the problems that haunted her all her life and retain a heart capable of compassion, able to respond to someone else’s misfortune. Matryona always helped those around her in anything, she even worked on the collective farm not for money, but for “workdays.” Many did not understand why she was doing this and thought it was stupid. Sister-in-law, after Matryona’s death, said about her: “...stupid, she helped strangers for free.” But for Matryona there were no strangers, everyone was “friends”, she treated even a stranger, Ignatyich, as if she were her own. After her death, he was the only person who truly grieved. Ivan Denisovich also has not lost his sense of compassion; he sympathizes with Alyosha the Baptist, the “moron” Caesar, and the Estonians deprived of their homeland. Other characters in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” are also not devoid of this feeling, for example, the foreman is trying to free his team from difficult work in undeveloped terrain, for which his charges are very grateful to him.
There has always been a conflict between the individual and society. Matryona, not understood by anyone, found herself in the worst position. The original title of the story was “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man,” but later it was renamed because it had a pronounced “religiosity.” Matryona was the very righteous person on whom the whole world rests. The scene was terrible when Matryona wanted to apply for a pension, but she was driven from one institution to another, and she had to walk tens of kilometers a day. Everyone was completely indifferent to her problem.
Ivan Denisovich took work seriously, he never did anything “for show,” in general, like Matryona. In the camp they said that when you do something for yourself, work, and when you do it for your superiors, show that you are working. Ivan Denisovich did not have time to work for himself, but in the camp he gave his all at work and worked without thinking whether he was doing it for himself “... he regrets every thing and every labor, so that they do not perish in vain.” Matryona never sits idle, she is always busy with something. She likes to do things, even those of others. She sees work as her only outlet. Matryona died because she was trying to help pull the sleigh off the rails. She helped move her house even though other people would have opposed it.
Our life is unfair and Solzhenitsyn showed this in his works. People who lived according to their conscience and tried to do everything right were not understood. Matryona is a righteous woman, but no one notices this. Matryona's neighbors and relatives only use her, without giving anything in return. I think she deserves more, at least thanks. The only person who understood what place Matryona occupied in the lives of those around her was Ignatyich, an outsider who knew her for a very short time, and, alas, he understood this only after her death.
Solzhenitsyn raises various problems in his work; he is interested in all aspects of life. Many works are autobiographical. In the work “Matryonin’s Dvor,” Ignatyich is copied from the author, and Alexander Isaevich conceived “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” while he was doing general work in the Ekibastuz special camp. So Alexander Isaevich describes the problems that he himself experienced, and makes readers feel this way about his works. Reading his stories and stories, we imagine ourselves in the shoes of the main characters, delve into their problems, look for solutions that will change our lives, and meet new people. I, personally, will forever remember the works of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn that I read.
Date of Birth: |
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Kislovodsk, Terek region, RSFSR |
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Prose writer, publicist, poet and public figure, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences |
Tale, short story, journalism, essay, novel, miniatures (“Tiny”), lexicography |
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Nobel Prize for Literature (1970) |
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Childhood and youth
During the war
Arrest and imprisonment
Arrest and sentence
Rehabilitation
First publications
Dissidence
Exile
Back in Russia
Death and burial
Family Children
Creation
Positive ratings
Awards and prizes
Perpetuation of memory
On stage and screen
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn(December 11, 1918, Kislovodsk - August 3, 2008, Moscow) - Russian writer, playwright, publicist, poet, public and political figure who lived and worked in the USSR, Switzerland, USA and Russia. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1970). A dissident who for several decades (1960s-1980s) actively opposed communist ideas, the political system of the USSR and the policies of its authorities.
In addition to artistic literary works, which, as a rule, touch upon acute socio-political issues, became widely known for his historical and journalistic works on history Russia XIX-XX centuries.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Alexander Isaevich (Isaakievich) Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk (now Stavropol Territory). Baptized in the Kislovodsk Church of the Holy Healer Panteleimon.
Father - Isaac Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn (1891-1918), a Russian peasant from the North Caucasus (the village of Sablinskaya in “August the Fourteenth”). Mother - Taisiya Zakharovna Shcherbak, Ukrainian, daughter of the owner of the richest economy in the Kuban, who with her intelligence and work rose to this level as a Tauride shepherd-farmer. Solzhenitsyn's parents met while studying in Moscow and soon got married. During the First World War, Isaac Solzhenitsyn volunteered to go to the front and was an officer. He died before the birth of his son, on June 15, 1918, after demobilization as a result of a hunting accident. He is depicted under the name Sanya (Isaak) Lazhenitsyn in the epic “The Red Wheel” (based on the memories of his wife - the writer’s mother).
As a result of the revolution and civil war, the family was ruined, and in 1924 Solzhenitsyn moved with his mother to Rostov-on-Don, from 1926 to 1936 he studied at school, living in poverty.
In elementary school, he was ridiculed for wearing a baptismal cross and unwillingness to join the pioneers, and was reprimanded for attending church. Under the influence of school, he accepted communist ideology and joined the Komsomol in 1936. In high school, I became interested in literature and began writing essays and poems; interested in history and social life. In 1937 he conceived a “great novel about the revolution” of 1917.
In 1936 he entered Rostov State University. Not wanting to make literature my main specialty, I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. According to the recollection of a school and university friend, “... I studied mathematics not so much by vocation, but because the physics and mathematics department had exceptionally educated and very interesting teachers.” One of them was D. D. Mordukhai-Boltovskoy. At the university, Solzhenitsyn studied “excellently” (Stalin scholarship recipient), continued literary exercises, and, in addition to university studies, independently studied history and Marxism-Leninism. He graduated from the university in 1941 with honors, he was awarded the qualification of a II category researcher in the field of mathematics and a teacher. The dean's office recommended him for the position of university assistant or graduate student.
From the very beginning literary activity was keenly interested in the history of the First World War and the Revolution. In 1937, he began collecting materials on the “Samson Disaster” and wrote the first chapters of “August the Fourteenth” (from an orthodox communist position). He was interested in theater, in the summer of 1938 he tried to pass exams at drama school Yu. A. Zavadsky, but unsuccessfully. In 1939 he entered the correspondence department of the Faculty of Literature of the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History in Moscow. He interrupted his studies in 1941 due to the war.
In August 1939, he and his friends took a kayak trip along the Volga. The writer’s life from that time until April 1945 was described by him in the autobiographical poem “Dorozhenka” (1947-1952).
During the war
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Solzhenitsyn was not immediately mobilized, since he was considered “limitedly fit” for health reasons. He actively sought conscription to the front. In September 1941, together with his wife, he was assigned as a school teacher in Morozovsk, Rostov region, but on October 18 he was drafted and sent to a horse-drawn cargo train as a private.
The events of the summer of 1941 - spring of 1942 are described by Solzhenitsyn in his unfinished story “Love the Revolution” (1948).
Sought directions to military school, in April 1942 he was sent to the artillery school in Kostroma; in November 1942, he was released as a lieutenant and sent to Saransk, where the Reserve Artillery Reconnaissance Regiment was located to form artillery instrumental reconnaissance divisions.
- In the active army since February 1943; served as commander of the 2nd sound reconnaissance battery of the 794th Separate Army Reconnaissance Artillery Division (OARAD) of the 44th Gun Artillery Brigade (PABr) of the 63rd Army on the Central and Bryansk Fronts, later, from the spring of 1944 - the 68th Sevsko -Rechitsa PABr (field post No. 07900 “F”) of the 48th Army of the Second Belorussian Front. The combat route is from Orel to East Prussia. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War and the Red Star; on September 15, 1943, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the rank of senior lieutenant, and on May 7, 1944 - captain.
At the front, despite the strictest ban, he kept a diary. He wrote a lot, sent his works to Moscow writers for review; in 1944 received a favorable review from B. A. Lavrenev.
Arrest and imprisonment
Arrest and sentence
At the front, Solzhenitsyn continued to be interested in public life, but became critical of Stalin (for “distorting Leninism”); in correspondence with an old friend (Nikolai Vitkevich), he spoke abusively about “Godfather,” by whom Stalin was guessed, kept in his personal belongings a “resolution” drawn up together with Vitkevich, in which he compared the Stalinist order with serfdom and spoke about the creation of an “organization” after the war to restore the so-called “Leninist” norms.
The letters aroused the suspicion of military censorship. On February 2, 1945, telegraph order No. 4146 was issued by the deputy head of the Main Counterintelligence Directorate “Smersh” of the USSR NPO, Lieutenant General Babich, on the immediate arrest of Solzhenitsyn and his delivery to Moscow. On February 3, the army counterintelligence began investigative case 2/2 No. 3694-45. On February 9, Solzhenitsyn was arrested at the unit’s headquarters and deprived of military rank captain, and then sent to Moscow, to the Lubyanka prison. The interrogations lasted from February 20 to May 25, 1945 (the investigator was the assistant to the head of the 3rd department of the XI department of the 2nd directorate of the NKGB of the USSR, state security captain Ezepov). On June 6, the head of the 3rd department of the XI department of the 2nd department, Colonel Itkin, his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Rublev, and investigator Ezepov, drew up an indictment, which was approved on June 8 by the 3rd rank State Security Commissioner Fedotov. On July 7, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced in absentia by a Special Meeting to 8 years in forced labor camps and eternal exile at the end of his term of imprisonment (under Article 58, paragraph 10, part 2, and paragraph 11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR).
Conclusion
In August he was sent to a camp in New Jerusalem, on September 9, 1945 he was transferred to a camp in Moscow, whose prisoners were engaged in the construction of residential buildings on the Kaluga Outpost (now Gagarin Square).
In June 1946, he was transferred to the special prison system of the 4th special department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in September he was sent to a closed design bureau (“sharashka”) at the aircraft engine plant in Rybinsk, five months later, in February 1947, to the “sharashka” in Zagorsk, 9 July 1947 - to a similar establishment in Marfin (on the northern outskirts of Moscow). There he worked as a mathematician.
In Marfin, Solzhenitsyn began work on the autobiographical poem “Dorozhenka” and the story “Love the Revolution,” which was conceived as a prose continuation of “Dorozhenka.” Later last days at the Marfinskaya sharashka are described by Solzhenitsyn in the novel “In the First Circle”, where he himself is introduced under the name of Gleb Nerzhin, and his cellmates Dmitry Panin and Lev Kopelev - Dmitry Sologdin and Lev Rubin.
In December 1948, his wife divorced Solzhenitsyn in absentia.
On May 19, 1950, due to a disagreement with the leadership of the Sharashka, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to Butyrka prison, from where in August he was sent to Steplag - to a special camp in Ekibastuz. Alexander Isaevich served almost a third of his prison term - from August 1950 to February 1953 - in the north of Kazakhstan. In the camp he worked as a general worker, for some time as a foreman, and took part in a strike. Later, camp life will receive literary embodiment in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, and the prisoner strike - in the film script “Tanks Know the Truth”.
In the winter of 1952, Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with seminoma and was operated on in the camp.
Liberation and exile
In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn became completely disillusioned with Marxism and, over time, leaned toward Orthodox-patriotic ideas. Already in the "sharashka" he began to write again, in Ekibastuz he composed poems, poems ("Dorozhenka", "Prussian Nights") and plays in verse ("Prisoners", "Feast of the Winners") and memorized them.
After his release, Solzhenitsyn was sent into exile in a settlement “forever” (the village of Berlik, Kokterek district, Dzhambul region, southern Kazakhstan). He worked as a mathematics and physics teacher in grades 8-10 at the local secondary school named after Kirov.
By the end of 1953, his health had deteriorated sharply, an examination revealed a cancerous tumor, in January 1954 he was sent to Tashkent for treatment, and was discharged in March with a significant improvement. Illness, treatment, healing and hospital experiences formed the basis of the story “Cancer Ward”, which was conceived in the spring of 1955.
Rehabilitation
In June 1956, by decision of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn was released without rehabilitation “due to the absence of corpus delicti in his actions.”
In August 1956 he returned from exile to Central Russia. He lived in the village of Miltsevo (Torfoprodukt post office, Kurlovsky district (now Gus-Khrustalny district), Vladimir region), taught mathematics and electrical engineering (physics) in grades 8-10 at Mezinovskaya secondary school. Then he met his ex-wife, who finally returned to him in November 1956 (remarried on February 2, 1957). Solzhenitsyn’s life in the Vladimir region is reflected in the story “Matryonin’s Dvor.”
On February 6, 1957, by decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated.
Since July 1957 he lived in Ryazan, worked as a physics and astronomy teacher at secondary school No. 2.
First publications
In 1959, Solzhenitsyn wrote the story “Shch-854” (later published in the magazine “New World” under the title “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) about the life of a simple prisoner from Russian peasants, in 1960 - the stories “A Village Is Not Worth Without a Righteous Man” and “The Right Brush”, the first “Little Ones”, the play “The Light that is in You” (“Candle in the Wind”). He experienced a creative crisis, seeing the impossibility of publishing his works.
In 1961, impressed by the speech of Alexander Tvardovsky (editor of the magazine “New World”) at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, he gave him “Shch-854”, having previously removed from the story the most politically sensitive fragments that were obviously not passable by Soviet censorship. Tvardovsky appreciated the story extremely highly, invited the author to Moscow and began to push for the publication of the work. N. S. Khrushchev overcame the resistance of Politburo members and allowed the publication of the story. The story entitled “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published in the magazine “New World” (No. 11, 1962), immediately republished and translated into foreign languages. On December 30, 1962, Solzhenitsyn was admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR.
Soon after this, “A village does not stand without a righteous man” (under the title “Matryonin’s Dvor”) and “An Incident at Kochetovka Station” (under the title “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”) were published in the magazine “New World” (No. 1, 1963).
The first publications evoked a huge number of responses from writers, public figures, critics and readers. Letters from readers - former prisoners (in response to “Ivan Denisovich”) laid the foundation for “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Solzhenitsyn's stories stood out sharply against the background of the works of that time for their artistic merit and civic courage. This was emphasized by many at that time, including writers and poets. Thus, V. T. Shalamov wrote in a letter to Solzhenitsyn in November 1962:
In the summer of 1963, he created the next, fifth, truncated “for censorship” edition of the novel “In the First Circle”, intended for publication (out of 87 chapters - “Circle-87”). Four chapters from the novel were selected by the author and offered to the New World “... for testing, under the guise of an “Excerpt” ...”.
On December 28, 1963, the editors of the magazine “New World” and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art nominated “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” for the Lenin Prize for 1964 (as a result of a vote of the Prize Committee, the proposal was rejected).
In 1964, for the first time, he submitted his work to samizdat - a cycle of “poems in prose” under common name"Little ones."
In the summer of 1964, the fifth edition of “In the First Circle” was discussed and accepted for publication in 1965 by Novy Mir. Tvardovsky became acquainted with the manuscript of the novel “Cancer Ward” and even offered it to Khrushchev for reading (again through his assistant Lebedev). Solzhenitsyn met with Shalamov, who had previously spoken favorably of “Ivan Denisovich,” and invited him to work together on “Archipelago.”
In the fall of 1964, the play “Candle in the Wind” was accepted for production at the Lenin Komsomol Theater in Moscow.
“Tiny Things” penetrated abroad through samizdat and, under the title “Sketches and Tiny Stories,” was published in October 1964 in Frankfurt in the magazine “Grani” (No. 56) - this is the first publication in the foreign Russian press of Solzhenitsyn’s work, rejected in the USSR.
In 1965, with B.A. Mozhaev, he traveled to the Tambov region to collect materials about the peasant uprising (during the trip, the name of the epic novel about the Russian revolution was determined - “The Red Wheel”), began the first and fifth parts of the “Archipelago” (in Solotch, Ryazan region and on the Kopli-Märdi farm near Tartu), finished work on the stories “What a Pity” and “Zakhar-Kalita”, on November 4 published in the “Literary Gazette” (polemicizing with academician V.V. Vinogradov) the article “It is not the custom to whiten cabbage soup with tar” “That’s why sour cream” in defense of Russian literary speech:
On September 11, the KGB conducted a search at the apartment of Solzhenitsyn’s friend V.L. Teush, with whom Solzhenitsyn kept part of his archive. Manuscripts of poems, “In the First Circle”, “Little Ones”, plays “Republic of Labor” and “Feast of the Winners” were confiscated.
The Central Committee of the CPSU published in a closed edition and distributed among the nomenklatura, “to incriminate the author,” “The Feast of the Winners” and the fifth edition of “In the First Circle.” Solzhenitsyn wrote complaints about the illegal seizure of manuscripts to the Minister of Culture of the USSR P. N. Demichev, the secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee L. I. Brezhnev, M. A. Suslov and Yu. V. Andropov, and transferred the manuscript of “Circle-87” for storage in the Central State Archives literature and art.
Four stories were proposed to the editors of “Ogonyok”, “October”, “Literary Russia”, “Moscow” - but were rejected everywhere. The newspaper "Izvestia" typed the story "Zakhar-Kalita" - the finished set was scattered, "Zakhar-Kalita" was transferred to the newspaper "Pravda" - there was a refusal from N. A. Abalkin, head of the department of literature and art.
At the same time, the collection “A. Solzhenitsyn. Favorites": "One Day...", "Kochetovka" and "Matryonin's Dvor"; in Germany in the publishing house "Posev" - a collection of stories in German.
Dissidence
By March 1963, Solzhenitsyn had lost Khrushchev’s favor (non-awarding of the Lenin Prize, refusal to publish the novel “In the First Circle”). After L. Brezhnev came to power, Solzhenitsyn practically lost the opportunity to legally publish and speak. In September 1965, the KGB confiscated Solzhenitsyn's archive with his most anti-Soviet works, which worsened the writer's situation. Taking advantage of a certain inaction of the authorities, in 1966 Solzhenitsyn began active social activities (meetings, speeches, interviews with foreign journalists): on October 24, 1966, he read excerpts from his works at the Institute of Atomic Energy named after. Kurchatova (“Cancer Ward” - chapters “How People Live,” “Justice,” “Absurdities”; “In the First Circle” - sections on prison visits; the first act of the play “Candle in the Wind”), November 30 - at an evening at the Institute Oriental Studies in Moscow (“In the First Circle” - chapters on exposing informers and the insignificance of opera; “Cancer Ward” - two chapters). At the same time, he began distributing his novels “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” in samizdat. In February 1967, he secretly completed the work “The Gulag Archipelago” - according to the author’s definition, “an experience artistic research».
In May 1967, he sent out a “Letter to the Congress” of the USSR Writers’ Union, which became widely known among the Soviet intelligentsia and in the West.
After the “Letter,” the authorities began to perceive Solzhenitsyn as a serious opponent. In 1968, when in the USA and Western Europe The novels “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” were published without the author’s permission, which brought popularity to the writer, the Soviet press began a propaganda campaign against the author. Soon after this, he was expelled from the USSR Writers' Union.
In August 1968, Solzhenitsyn met Natalya Svetlova, they began an affair. Solzhenitsyn began to seek a divorce from his first wife. With great difficulty, the divorce was obtained on July 22, 1972.
After his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn began to openly declare his Orthodox patriotic beliefs and sharply criticize the authorities. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was eventually awarded the prize. From the first publication of Solzhenitsyn’s work to the awarding of the award, only eight years passed - nothing like this in history Nobel Prizes in literature there was neither before nor after. The writer emphasized the political aspect of the award, although the Nobel Committee denied this. A powerful propaganda campaign against Solzhenitsyn was organized in Soviet newspapers, up to the publication of Dean Reed's “open letter to Solzhenitsyn” in the Soviet press. The Soviet authorities offered Solzhenitsyn to leave the country, but he refused.
In the late 1960s - early 1970s, a special unit was created in the KGB, dedicated exclusively to the operational development of Solzhenitsyn - the 9th Department of the 5th Directorate.
On June 11, 1971, Solzhenitsyn’s novel “August of the Fourteenth” was published in Paris, in which the author’s Orthodox patriotic views are clearly expressed. In August 1971, the KGB carried out an operation to physically eliminate Solzhenitsyn - during a trip to Novocherkassk, he was secretly given an injection of an unknown toxic substance (presumably ricin). The writer survived after this, but was seriously ill for a long time.
In 1972, he wrote a “Lenten Letter” to Patriarch Pimen about the problems of the Church, in support of the speech of Archbishop Hermogenes (Golubev) of Kaluga.
In 1972-1973 he worked on the epic “The Red Wheel”, but did not conduct active dissident activities.
In August - September 1973, relations between the authorities and dissidents worsened, which also affected Solzhenitsyn.
On August 23, 1973, he gave a long interview to foreign correspondents. On the same day, the KGB detained one of the writer’s assistants, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. During the interrogation, she was forced to reveal the location of one copy of the manuscript of the Gulag Archipelago. Returning home, she hanged herself. On September 5, Solzhenitsyn learned about what had happened and ordered the printing of “Archipelago” to begin in the West (in the emigrant publishing house YMCA-Press). At the same time, he sent the leadership of the USSR a “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union,” in which he called for abandoning communist ideology and taking steps to transform the USSR into a Russian national state. Since the end of August, the Western press has published a large number of articles in defense of dissidents and, in particular, Solzhenitsyn.
The USSR launched a powerful propaganda campaign against dissidents. On August 31, the Pravda newspaper published an open letter from a group of Soviet writers condemning Solzhenitsyn and A.D. Sakharov, “slandering our state and social system.” On September 24, the KGB, through Solzhenitsyn’s ex-wife, offered the writer the official publication of the story “Cancer Ward” in the USSR in exchange for refusing to publish “The Gulag Archipelago” abroad. However, Solzhenitsyn, having said that he did not object to the printing of “Cancer Corps” in the USSR, did not express a desire to bind himself to an unspoken agreement with the authorities. In late December 1973, the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was announced. A massive campaign of denigration of Solzhenitsyn as a traitor to the motherland with the label of “literary Vlasovite” began in the Soviet media. The emphasis was not on the actual content of “The Gulag Archipelago” (an artistic study of the Soviet camp-prison system of 1918-1956), which was not discussed at all, but on Solzhenitsyn’s alleged solidarity with “traitors to the motherland during the war, policemen and Vlasovites.”
In the USSR, during the years of stagnation, “August the Fourteenth” and “The Gulag Archipelago” (like the first novels) were distributed in samizdat.
At the end of 1973, Solzhenitsyn became the initiator and collector of a group of authors of the collection “From Under the Blocks” (published by YMCA-Press in Paris in 1974), wrote for this collection the articles “On the return of breathing and consciousness”, “Repentance and self-restraint as categories of national life", "Education".
Exile
On January 7, 1974, the release of the “Gulag Archipelago” and measures to “suppress anti-Soviet activities” of Solzhenitsyn were discussed at a meeting of the Politburo. The issue was brought to the Central Committee of the CPSU, Yu. V. Andropov and others spoke in favor of expulsion; for arrest and exile - Kosygin, Brezhnev, Podgorny, Shelepin, Gromyko and others. Andropov's opinion prevailed. It is interesting that earlier one of the “Soviet leaders,” Minister of Internal Affairs N. Shchelokov, sent a note to the Politburo in defense of Solzhenitsyn (“On the Question of Solzhenitsyn,” October 7, 1971), but his proposals (including the publication of “Cancer Ward” ") did not find support. According to the testimony of the then head of the Moscow passport office, police colonel N. Ya. Amosov: “Judging by Shchelokov’s characteristic statements, all this fuss was clearly not to his liking. (...) but it was not Shchelokov, with all his position, who was given the opportunity to resolve this “state” issue.”
On February 12, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of treason and deprived of Soviet citizenship. On February 13, he was expelled from the USSR (delivered to Germany by plane).
On February 14, 1974, an order was issued by the head of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR “On the removal of the works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn from libraries and the bookselling network.” In accordance with this order, the issues of the New World magazines were destroyed: No. 11 for 1962 (it published the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”), No. 1 for 1963 (with the stories “Matryonin’s Dvor” and “An Incident at the Station Krechetovka"), No. 7 for 1963 (with the story “For the benefit of the cause”) and No. 1 for 1966 (with the story “Zakhar-Kalita”); “Roman-newspaper” No. 1 for 1963 and separate publications of “Ivan Denisovich” (publishing houses “Soviet Writer” and Uchpedgiz - a publication for the blind, as well as publications in Lithuanian and Estonian languages). Foreign publications (including magazines and newspapers) containing Solzhenitsyn's works were also subject to confiscation. The publications were destroyed by “cutting into small pieces,” about which a corresponding act was drawn up, signed by the head of the library and its employees who destroyed the magazines.
On March 29, the Solzhenitsyn family left the USSR. The assistant to the US military attache, William Odom, helped secretly take the writer’s archive and military awards abroad. Soon after his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn made a short trip to Northern Europe, as a result, decided to temporarily settle in Zurich, Switzerland.
On March 3, 1974, the “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union” was published in Paris; leading Western publications and many democratically minded dissidents in the USSR, including A.D. Sakharov and Roy Medvedev, assessed the “Letter” as anti-democratic, nationalistic and containing “dangerous delusions”; Solzhenitsyn's relations with the Western press continued to deteriorate.
In the summer of 1974, using fees from the Gulag Archipelago, he created the Russian Public Fund for Assistance to the Persecuted and Their Families to help political prisoners in the USSR (parcels and money transfers to places of detention, legal and illegal financial assistance to the families of prisoners).
In 1974-1975, in Zurich, he collected materials about Lenin’s life in exile (for the epic “The Red Wheel”), completed and published the memoirs “A Calf Butted an Oak Tree.”
In April 1975, he and his family traveled through Western Europe, then headed to Canada and the USA. In June - July 1975, Solzhenitsyn visited Washington and New York, making speeches at the Congress of Trade Unions and in the US Congress. In his speeches, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the communist regime and ideology, called on the United States to abandon cooperation with the USSR and the policy of détente; at that time the writer still continued to perceive the West as an ally in the liberation of Russia from “communist totalitarianism.” At the same time, Solzhenitsyn feared that in the event of a rapid transition to democracy in the USSR, interethnic conflicts might escalate.
In August 1975 he returned to Zurich and continued work on the epic “The Red Wheel”.
In February 1976, he toured Great Britain and France, by which time anti-Western motives had become noticeable in his speeches. In March 1976, the writer visited Spain. In a sensational speech on Spanish television, he praised Franco's recent regime and warned Spain against "moving too quickly towards democracy." Criticism of Solzhenitsyn has intensified in the Western press, some leading European and American politicians declared disagreement with his views.
Soon after his appearance in the West, he became close to the old emigrant organizations and the YMCA-Press publishing house, in which he took a leading position, without becoming its formal leader. He was subjected to cautious criticism in the emigrant community for the decision to remove the emigrant publishing house from management public figure Morozov, who led the publishing house for about 30 years.
Solzhenitsyn’s ideological disagreements with the “third wave” emigration (that is, those who left the USSR in the 1970s) and Western Cold War activists are highlighted in his memoirs “A Grain Landed Between Two Millstones,” as well as in numerous emigrant publications.
In April 1976, he moved with his family to the United States and settled in the town of Cavendish (Vermont). After his arrival, the writer returned to work on “The Red Wheel,” for which he spent two months in the Russian emigrant archive at the Hoover Institution.
He rarely communicated with representatives of the press and the public, which is why he was known as a “Vermont recluse.”
Back in Russia
With the advent of perestroika, the official attitude in the USSR towards Solzhenitsyn’s creativity and activities began to change. Many of his works were published, in particular, in the magazine “New World” in 1989, separate chapters of “The Gulag Archipelago” were published.
On September 18, 1990, simultaneously in Literaturnaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn’s article was published on ways to revive the country, on the reasonable, in his opinion, foundations for building the life of the people and the state - “How can we build Russia.” The article developed Solzhenitsyn’s long-standing thoughts, expressed earlier in his “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union” and in his journalistic works, in particular, those included in the collection “From Under the Blocks.” Solzhenitsyn donated the royalties for this article to the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The article generated a huge number of responses.
In 1990, Solzhenitsyn was restored to Soviet citizenship with the subsequent termination of the criminal case, and in December of the same year he was awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR for “The Gulag Archipelago.”
According to V. Kostikov’s story, during B. N. Yeltsin’s first official visit to the USA in 1992, immediately upon arriving in Washington, Boris Nikolayevich called Solzhenitsyn from the hotel and had a “long” conversation with him, in particular about the Kuril Islands. “The writer’s opinion was unexpected and shocking to many: “I studied the entire history of the islands from the 12th century. These are not our islands, Boris Nikolaevich. Need to give it away. But it’s expensive...”
On April 27-30, 1992, film director Stanislav Govorukhin visited Solzhenitsyn at his home in Vermont and filmed the television film “Alexander Solzhenitsyn” in two parts.
Together with his family, he returned to his homeland on May 27, 1994, flying from the USA to Magadan. Then from Vladivostok I traveled by train across the whole country and ended the trip in the capital. He spoke at the State Duma of the Russian Federation.
In the mid-1990s, by personal order of President Boris Yeltsin, he was given the state dacha “Sosnovka-2” in Troitse-Lykovo. The Solzhenitsyns designed and built a two-story brick house there with a large hall, a glassed-in gallery, a living room with a fireplace, a concert piano and a library where portraits of P. Stolypin and A. Kolchak hang.
In 1997 he was elected full member Russian Academy Sci.
In 1998, he was awarded the Order of the Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called, but refused the award: “I cannot accept the award from the supreme power that brought Russia to its current disastrous state.”
Awarded the Great Gold Medal named after M.V. Lomonosov (1998).
In April 2006, answering questions from the Moscow News newspaper, Solzhenitsyn said:
On June 12, 2007, President V. Putin visited Solzhenitsyn and congratulated him on being awarded the State Prize.
Soon after the author’s return to the country, a literary prize named after him was established to reward writers “whose work has high artistic merit, contributes to self-knowledge of Russia, and makes a significant contribution to the preservation and careful development of the traditions of Russian literature.”
He spent the last years of his life in Moscow and at a dacha near Moscow. At the end of 2002, he suffered a severe hypertensive crisis; in the last years of his life he was seriously ill, but continued to engage in creative activities. Together with his wife Natalya Dmitrievna, president of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Foundation, he worked on the preparation and publication of his most complete, 30-volume collected works. After a serious operation he underwent, only his right hand was functional.
In “The First Circle,” the dispute between Sologdin and Rubin, in addition to discussions about the laws of dialectics, is highly politicized. Nerzhin, being in a state of general cautious skepticism, should not have interfered. He is obviously trying to consider some more general, fundamental problem, larger than just the communist one. At that time, the author himself, together with Nerzhin, had not yet seen it. And it emerged as one of the world's largest mental phenomena. Since then, over the years, I have already had to speak out about it more than once: this is the collapse in the 20th century of the foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and secular anthropocentrism. (The worldwide consequences of this collapse have not yet fully emerged.) Interview with Daniel Kelman for Cicero magazine in 2006. |
Death and burial
Solzhenitsyn’s last confession was received by Archpriest Nikolai Chernyshov, a cleric of the Church of St. Nicholas in Kleniki.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008, at the age of 90, in his home in Trinity-Lykovo. Death occurred at 23:45 Moscow time from acute heart failure.
On August 5, in the building of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of which A.I. Solzhenitsyn was a full member, a civil memorial service and farewell to the deceased took place. This funeral ceremony was attended by ex-president USSR M. S. Gorbachev, Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yu. S. Osipov, Rector of Moscow State University V. A. Sadovnichy, former Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation academician E. M. Primakov, figures Russian culture and several thousand citizens.
The funeral liturgy and funeral service on August 6, 2008 in the Great Cathedral of the Moscow Donskoy Monastery was performed by Archbishop Alexy (Frolov) of Orekhovo-Zuevsky, vicar of the Moscow diocese. On the same day, the ashes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn were interred with military honors (as a war veteran) in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery behind the altar of the Church of St. John Climacus, next to the grave of the historian Vasily Klyuchevsky. Russian President D. A. Medvedev returned to Moscow from a short vacation to attend the funeral service.
On August 3, 2010, on the second anniversary of his death, a monument was erected at Solzhenitsyn’s grave - a marble cross, created according to the design of the sculptor D. M. Shakhovsky.
Family Children
- Wives:
- Natalya Alekseevna Reshetovskaya (1919-2003; married to Solzhenitsyn from April 27, 1940 to (formally) 1972), author of five memoir books about her husband, including “Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Reading Russia” (1990), “The Rupture” (1992) and others.
- Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyna (Svetlova) (b. 1939) (from April 20, 1973)
- Sons from his second marriage: Ermolai (b. 1970; in 2010 - managing partner of the Moscow office of McKinsey Сompany CIS), Ignat (b. 1972), Stepan (b. 1973). Ermolai and Stepan live and work in Russia, Ignat is a pianist and conductor, a professor at the Philadelphia Conservatory.
- Adopted son - the son of N. D. Solzhenitsyna from her first marriage, Dmitry Tyurin (1962-1994, died just before returning to Russia, buried in the USA).
- Grandchildren: Ivan, Andrey, Dmitry, Anna, Ekaterina, Tatyana (daughter of Dmitry Tyurin’s adopted son).
Accusations of informing the NKVD authorities
Beginning in 1976, the West German writer and criminologist Frank Arnau accused Solzhenitsyn of being a camp “snitch,” citing a copy of the autograph of the so-called “Denunciation of Vetrov” dated January 20, 1952. The reason for the accusations was Solzhenitsyn’s own description in Chapter 12 of the second volume of “The Gulag Archipelago” of the process of recruiting him as an informant by the NKVD (under the pseudonym “Vetrov”). Solzhenitsyn emphasized there that, having been formally recruited, he did not write a single denunciation. It is noteworthy that even the Czechoslovak journalist Tomasz Rzesach, who wrote the book “Solzhenitsyn’s Spiral of Betrayal” at the request of the 5th Directorate of the KGB, did not consider it possible to use this “document” obtained by Arnau. Solzhenitsyn provided the Western press with samples of his handwriting for a handwriting examination, but Arnau declined to conduct the examination. In turn, Arnau and Rzezach were accused of contacts with the Stasi and the KGB, whose Fifth Directorate, as part of Operation Spider, tried to discredit Solzhenitsyn.
In 1998, journalist O. Davydov put forward a version of “self-denunciation”, for which Solzhenitsyn, besides himself, accused four people, one of whom, N. Vitkevich, was sentenced to ten years. Solzhenitsyn denied these accusations.
Creation
Solzhenitsyn’s work is distinguished by the formulation of large-scale epic tasks, demonstration historical events through the eyes of several characters of different social levels, located on opposite sides of the barricades. His style is characterized by biblical allusions, associations with the classical epic (Dante, Goethe), symbolism of the composition, the author’s position is not always expressed (a clash is presented different points vision). A distinctive feature of his works is documentary; most characters have real prototypes, personally known to the writer. “Life for him is more symbolic and meaningful than literary fiction" The novel “The Red Wheel” is characterized by the active use of the purely documentary genre (reporting, transcripts), the use of techniques of modernist poetics (Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged the influence of Dos Passos on him); In general artistic philosophy, the influence of Leo Tolstoy is noticeable.
For Solzhenitsyn, as in artistic prose, and in essay writing, attention to the riches of the Russian language is characteristic, the use of rare words from Dahl’s dictionary (which he began to analyze in his youth), Russian writers and everyday experience, their replacement of foreign words; this work culminated in the separately published “Russian Dictionary of Language Extension”
Positive ratings
K.I. Chukovsky called “Ivan Denisovich” a “literary miracle” in his internal review: “With this story a very strong, original and mature writer entered literature”; "a wonderful depiction of camp life under Stalin."
A. A. Akhmatova highly appreciated “Matryona’s Dvor”, noting the symbolism of the work (“This is worse than “Ivan Denisovich”... There you can push everything into a cult of personality, but here... After all, it’s not Matryona, but the entire Russian village that fell under the locomotive and to pieces..."), imagery of individual details.
Andrei Tarkovsky noted in his diary in 1970: “He is a good writer. And above all, a citizen. He is somewhat embittered, which is quite understandable if you judge him as a person, and which is more difficult to understand if you consider him primarily a writer. But his personality is heroic. Noble and stoic."
Human rights activist G. P. Yakunin believed that Solzhenitsyn was “a great writer - high level not only from an artistic point of view,” and also managed to dispel the belief in a communist utopia in the West with “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Solzhenitsyn’s biographer L.I. Saraskina owns this general characteristics her hero: “He emphasized many times: “I am not a dissident.” He is a writer - and he never felt like anyone else... he would not lead any party, he would not accept any post, although they were waiting for him and calling him. But Solzhenitsyn, oddly enough, is strong when he is alone in the field. He has proven this many times."
Literary critic L. A. Anninsky believed that Solzhenitsyn played a historical role as a “prophet”, a “political practitioner” who destroyed the system, who in the eyes of society was responsible for Negative consequences of his activities, from which he himself was “horrified.”
V. G. Rasputin believed that Solzhenitsyn was “both in literature and in public life... one of the most powerful figures in the entire history of Russia,” “a great moralist, a fair man, and a talent.”
V.V. Putin said that in all his meetings with Solzhenitsyn, he “was amazed every time at how organic and a convinced statesman Solzhenitsyn was. He could oppose the existing regime, disagree with the authorities, but the state was a constant for him.”
Criticism
Criticism of Solzhenitsyn since 1962, when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, paints a rather complex picture; often former allies 10-20 years later attacked him with harsh accusations. Two unequal parts can be distinguished - voluminous criticism literary creativity and socio-political views (representatives of almost the entire social spectrum, in Russia and abroad) and sporadic discussions of certain “controversial” moments of his biography.
In the 1960s - 1970s, a campaign was carried out in the USSR against Solzhenitsyn, with various accusations against Solzhenitsyn - a “slanderer” and a “literary Vlasovite” - made, in particular, by Mikhail Sholokhov, American singer Dean Reed, poet Stepan Shchipachev (author of an article in the Literary Gazette entitled “The End of the Literary Vlasovite”).
In the USSR, in dissident circles in the 1960s and early 1970s, criticism of Solzhenitsyn was equated, if not with collaboration with the KGB, then with a betrayal of the ideas of freedom. Writer Vladimir Maksimov recalled:
I belonged to the environment that surrounded him and Andrei Sakharov (...) His position at that time seemed to all of us absolutely correct and the only possible one. We perceived any criticism of him, official or private, as a slap in the face or a stab in the back.
Subsequently (Solzhenitsyn himself dated his loss of “solid support from society” to the period between the publication of “August the Fourteenth” in June 1971 and the distribution of “Lenten Letter to Patriarch Pimen” in Samizdat in the spring of 1972), criticism of him also began to come from Soviet dissidents ( both liberal and extremely conservative).
In 1974, Andrei Sakharov spoke critically of Solzhenitsyn’s views, disagreeing with the proposed authoritarian option for the transition from communism (as opposed to the democratic path of development), “religious-patriarchal romanticism” and the overestimation of the ideological factor in the then conditions. Sakharov compared Solzhenitsyn's ideals with official Soviet ideology, including those of the Stalin era, and warned of the dangers associated with them. Dissident Grigory Pomerants, recognizing that in Russia for many the path to Christianity began with reading “Matryonin’s Court,” generally did not share Solzhenitsyn’s views on communism as an absolute evil and pointed to Russian roots Bolshevism, and also pointed out the dangers of anti-communism as a “choking of the struggle.” Solzhenitsyn’s friend from prison in the Sharashka, literary critic and human rights activist Lev Kopelev, in exile, publicly criticized Solzhenitsyn’s views several times, and in 1985 he summarized his complaints in a letter where he accused Solzhenitsyn of the spiritual split of the emigration and intolerance of dissent. There is a well-known sharp correspondence polemic between Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sinyavsky, who repeatedly attacked him in the emigrant journal Syntax.
Roy Medvedev criticized Solzhenitsyn, pointing out that “his young orthodox Marxism did not withstand the tests of the camp, making him an anti-communist. You cannot justify yourself and your instability by denigrating the “communists in the camps,” portraying them as die-hard orthodoxies or traitors, while distorting the truth. It is unworthy of a Christian, as Solzhenitsyn considers himself to be, to gloat and mock at those executed in 1937-1938. Bolsheviks, considering this as retribution for the “Red Terror”. And it is absolutely unacceptable to layer the book with “insignificant in quantity, but impressive in composition, an element of tendentious untruth.” Medvedev also criticized the “Letter to the Leaders”, calling it a “disappointing document”, “an unrealistic and incompetent utopia”, pointing out that “Solzhenitsyn does not know Marxism at all, attributing various nonsense to the teaching”, and that “with the technical superiority of the USSR, a predicted war on the part of China would be suicide."
Varlam Shalamov wrote in 1971 about Solzhenitsyn and his work: “Solzhenitsyn’s activities are the activities of a businessman, narrowly aimed at personal success with all the provocative accessories of such activities...”.
Human rights activist Gleb Yakunin, recognizing that Solzhenitsyn “was a great writer - of a high level not only from an artistic point of view,” described his disappointment with Solzhenitsyn’s activities after his expulsion from the USSR, in particular, by the fact that Solzhenitsyn, having gone abroad, “all his dissident, I completely stopped my human rights activities.”
American Soviet historian Richard Pipes wrote about his political and historiosophical views, criticizing Solzhenitsyn for idealizing Tsarist Russia and attributing responsibility for communism to the West.
Critics point to contradictions between Solzhenitsyn’s estimates of the number of repressed people and archival data that became available during the perestroika period (for example, estimates of the number of deportees during collectivization - more than 15 million); Solzhenitsyn is criticized for justifying the collaboration of Soviet prisoners of war with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War.
Solzhenitsyn’s study of the history of relations between the Jewish and Russian peoples in the book “Two Hundred Years Together” aroused criticism from a number of publicists, historians and writers.
Writer Vladimir Bushin, who in the mid-1960s published a number of laudatory articles about Solzhenitsyn’s work in the central press of the USSR, later sharply criticized his work and activities in the book “The Genius of the First Spit” (2005).
In 2010, publicist Alexander Dyukov accused Solzhenitsyn of using Wehrmacht propaganda materials as official archival sources of information.
According to the writer Zinovy Zinik, “<находясь на Западе>, Solzhenitsyn never understood that political ideas have no spiritual value outside of their practical application. In practice, his views on patriotism, morality and religion attracted the most reactionary part of Russian society.”
Solzhenitsyn's image has been subjected to satirical image in the novel by Vladimir Voinovich “Moscow 2042” and in the poem by Yuri Kuznetsov “The Way of Christ”. Voinovich, in addition, wrote a journalistic book “Portrait against the Background of Myth,” in which he critically assessed Solzhenitsyn’s work and his role in the spiritual history of the country.
Awards and prizes
Perpetuation of memory
On September 20, 1990, the Ryazan City Council awarded A. Solzhenitsyn the title of honorary citizen of the city of Ryazan. Memorial plaques perpetuating the writer’s work in the city were installed on the building of city school No. 2 and residential building No. 17 on Uritsky Street.
In June 2003, a museum dedicated to the writer was opened in the main building of the Ryazan College of Electronics.
On the day of the funeral, President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree “On perpetuating the memory of A. I. Solzhenitsyn,” according to which, since 2009, personal scholarships named after A. I. Solzhenitsyn were established for students of Russian universities, the Moscow government was recommended to name one of the city streets after Solzhenitsyn, and the government of the Stavropol Territory and the administration of the Rostov region - to implement measures to perpetuate the memory of A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the cities of Kislovodsk and Rostov-on-Don.
On December 11, 2008, the opening took place in Kislovodsk memorial plaque on the building of the central city library, which was named after Solzhenitsyn.
On September 9, 2009, by order of the Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Andrei Fursenko, a mandatory minimum content of basic educational programs on Russian literature of the twentieth century is supplemented by the study of fragments of the artistic study of Alexander Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”. The “school” version, shortened by four times, with full preservation of the structure of the work, was prepared for publication by the writer’s widow. Previously in school curriculum The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” have already been included. The biography of the writer is studied in history lessons.
In November 2009, the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was given to one of the streets of the largest park in Rome, Villa Ada.
On August 3, 2010, on the second anniversary of the death of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the abbot of the Donskoy Monastery, Bishop Kirill of Pavlovo-Posad, co-served with the brethren of the monastery, performed a memorial service at the writer’s grave. Before the funeral service, Kirill blessed a new stone cross installed on the grave of A. I. Solzhenitsyn, created according to the design of the sculptor D. M. Shakhovsky.
On December 11, 2011, on the 93rd anniversary of the birth of A. Solzhenitsyn, a commemorative bronze bas-relief of the writer (sculptor D. Lyndin) was installed in Rostov-on-Don on the building of the economics and law faculties of the Southern Federal University (SFU). The bas-relief was made with public donations on the initiative and with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Rostov Region, the administration of Rostov-on-Don, and the leadership of the Southern Federal University.
Since 2009, the scientific and cultural center House of Russian Abroad named after Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Moscow has been named after him (from 1995 to 2009 - Library-Foundation "Russian Abroad") - a museum-type scientific and cultural center for the preservation, study and popularization of history and modern life Russian abroad.
On January 23, 2013, at a meeting of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, a decision was made to create a second museum dedicated to Solzhenitsyn in Ryazan. Options for a museum location are currently being considered.
On March 5, 2013, the authorities of the American city of Cavendish (Vermont) decided to create a Solzhenitsyn Museum.
In 2013, the name of Solzhenitsyn was given to Mezinovskaya high school(Gus-Khrustalny district of the Vladimir region), where he taught in 1956-1957. On October 26, a bust of the writer was unveiled near the school.
On September 26, a monument to Solzhenitsyn (sculptor Anatoly Shishkov) was unveiled on the alley of Nobel laureates in front of the building of Belgorod University. It is the first monument to Solzhenitsyn in Russia.
On December 12, 2013, Aeroflot put into operation the Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft, named “A. Solzhenitsyn."
Toponyms
On August 12, 2008, the Moscow Government adopted a resolution “On perpetuating the memory of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in Moscow,” which renamed Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street to Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street and approved the text of the memorial plaque. Some residents of the street protested its renaming.
In October 2008, the mayor of Rostov-on-Don signed a decree naming the central avenue of the Liventsovsky microdistrict under construction after Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In 2013, streets in Voronezh and Khabarovsk were named after Solzhenitsyn.
On stage and screen
Solzhenitsyn's works in the drama theater
- "Olen and Shalashovka." Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov. Moscow. (1991; updated version - 1993)
- "Feast of the Winners" State Academic Maly Theater of Russia. Moscow. Premiere of the play - January 1995
Performances based on the works of Solzhenitsyn in the drama theater
- "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich." Chitinsky Theatre of Drama (1989)
- "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich." Kharkov Ukrainian Drama Theater named after Shevchenko. Directed by Andrey Zholdak. 2003
- "Matryonin's yard" Russian spiritual theater "Glas". Director (stage version and production) Vladimir Ivanov. Starring Elena Mikhailova ( Matryona), Alexander Mikhailov ( Ignatyich). May 11 and 24, June 20, 2007
- "Matryonin's yard" State Academic Theater named after. E. Vakhtangov. Director Vladimir Ivanov. Starring Elena Mikhailova ( Matryona), Alexander Mikhailov ( Ignatyich). Premiere April 13, 2008.
- "Matryonin's yard" Ekaterinburg Orthodox Theater “Laboratory of Dramatic Art named after. M. A. Chekhov" - performance was shown in January 2010. Director Natalya Milchenko, Matryona- Svetlana Abasheva
- "GULAG Archipelago". Moscow youth theater under the leadership of Vyacheslav Spesivtsev. Moscow (1990)
- "Word of truth." Dramatization based on the works of Solzhenitsyn. Theater-studio "Credo". Pyatigorsk (1990)
- “Sharashka” (dramatization of chapters of the novel “In the First Circle”; premiere December 11, 1998). Performance of the Moscow Taganka Theater. Director (composition and production) Yuri Lyubimov, artist David Borovsky, composer Vladimir Martynov. Starring Dmitry Mulyar ( Nerzhin), Timur Badalbeyli ( Ruby), Alexey Grabbe ( Sologdin), Valery Zolotukhin ( Uncle Avenir, Pryanchikov, Spiridon Egorov), Dmitry Vysotsky and Vladislav Malenko ( Volodin), Erwin Haase( Gerasimovich), Yuri Lyubimov ( Stalin). The performance was staged for Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday.
- "Cancer Ward". Hans Otto Theater (German) Hans Otto Theater), Potsdam, Germany. 2012. Author of the stage version John von Duffel ( John von Duffel). Directed by Tobias Wellemeyer ( Tobias Wellemeyer). As Kostoglotov, Wolfgang Vogler ( Wolfgang Vogler), in the role of Rusanov Jon-Kaare Koppe ( Jon-Kaare Koppe).
Solzhenitsyn's works in musical theater
- "In the first circle." Opera. Libretto and music by J. Amy. National Opera of Lyon (1999)
- “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is an opera in two acts by A. V. Tchaikovsky. World premiere took place on May 16, 2009 in Perm on the stage of the Academic Opera and Ballet Theater named after P. I. Tchaikovsky (conductor-producer Valery Platonov, stage director Georgy Isaakyan, production designer Ernst Heydebrecht (Germany), choirmasters Vladimir Nikitenkov, Dmitry Batin, Tatyana Stepanova .
Solzhenitsyn's works concert programs
- Reading of fragments of the novel “In the First Circle” by artist N. Pavlov at the evening of the Maly Theater (Moscow) “Returned Pages”
- "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich." Solo performance by A. G. Filippenko. Moscow theater "Praktika" (2006). Public reading of the story as part of the joint project “One Book - Two Cities” of the All-Russian Library of Foreign Literature (Moscow) and the Public Library of Chicago; and for the Day of Political Prisoners (2008).
- “The incident at Kochetovka station.” Solo performance by A. Filippenko. The television adaptation was carried out by Clio Film Studio CJSC (Russia) (director Stepan Grigorenko) commissioned by the Kultura TV channel (2001). First broadcast on television on the Kultura TV channel on August 4, 2008.
- "Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich" (2010). Alexander Filippenko reads Solzhenitsyn’s “Little Things” (including on the radio), D. Shostakovich’s music is performed by the Hermitage ensemble of soloists.
- “After reading Solzhenitsyn’s opuses. Five views on the country of the Gulag" ("Zone", "Walking Stage", "Blatnye", "Lesopoval", "Godfather and the Six"). Performance of a five-part suite by Ukrainian composer Viktor Vlasov by the Bayan City ensemble on stage concert hall them. S. Prokofiev (Chelyabinsk) (solo concert - October 2010).
- "Reflection in the water." A program for dramatic actor, soloist and chamber orchestra, including Solzhenitsyn’s “Little Things” performed by A. Filippenko and D. D. Shostakovich’s “Prelude” performed by the State Academic Chamber Orchestra of Russia conducted by A. Yu. Utkin. Premiere: December 10, 2013 Great hall Moscow Conservatory.
Solzhenitsyn's works in film and television
- Television play based on the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, English television company NBC (November 8, 1963).
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Feature Film. Directed by K. Wrede. Script by R. Harwood and A. Solzhenitsyn. “Norsk Film” (Norway), “Leontis Film” (UK), “Group-V Production” (USA) (1970)
- The incident at Krechetovka station. Short film by Gleb Panfilov (1964)
- “Ett möte på KretjetovkaStationen.” Screenplay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Sweden (TV 1970)
- "Thirteenth Corps" ("Krebsstation"). Dir. Heinz Schirk, screenplay by Karl Wittlinger. Germany (TV 1970)
- Candle in the wind. TV movie (screen adaptation of the play “Candle in the Wind”). Directed by Michel Wien; Screenplay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alfreda Aucouturier. Production on ORTF French Television (1973)
- In 1973, an hour and a half film based on the novel “In the First Circle” was shot by Polish director Alexander Ford; script: A. Ford and A. Solzhenitsyn. Denmark-Sweden.
- In the early 1990s, the two-part French film The Fist Circle was released. TV movie. Directed by S. Larry. Script by C. Cohen and A. Solzhenitsyn. CBC. USA-Canada, jointly with France (1991). The film was shown in Russia in 1994.
- "In the first circle." Solzhenitsyn is a co-author of the script and reads a voiceover from the author. Directed by G. Panfilov. TV channel "Russia", film company "Vera" (2006).
- Almost simultaneously with the series, filming of a feature film based on the novel (the plot basis of A. Solzhenitsyn) took place; the script for the film version was written by Gleb Panfilov. The premiere of the film “Keep Forever” took place on December 12, 2008 in cinemas in Moscow and London (with subtitles)