His monumental work, “The Gulag archipelago” about the brutal Stalinist prison camp had made Solzhenitsyn world. 11. In December 1918, and today, 100 years ago, was born Russian writer.
“The salvation of humanity consists precisely in the fact that all terms of everything.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words sound pathetic but it’s true, today perhaps even more than nearly 50 years ago, in his speech to the Nobel prize for literature in 1970. At the time, he could not read his thoughts himself, he stayed away from the ceremony because he was afraid he would not be in the Soviet Union and his family to return. In person he was the first, in his honor four years later, in December 1974, when occurred, which had feared the Russian writer years before Expatriation and deportation to the Federal Republic of Germany.
Shared worship in the Solzhenitsyn-the year in Russia
The year 2018 has been declared by President Vladimir Putin in Russia to Solzhenitsyn-year. However, dealing with the legacy of the great truth-seekers and Mahners Solzhenitsyn is ambivalent in his father’s country. As “the great son of Russia,” died in August, ten years ago, received him then-President Dimitry Medvedev and Putin, declared the “Gulag archipelago” even to the school reading. Nowadays, where Stalin is revered in some circles, again retro-longingly, Solzhenitsyn and his work of many Russians regarded with suspicion.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who came in 1918 in the Northern Caucasus to the world, was a physics teacher in the area of Rostov, before he was moved in 1941 to the Red army. In 1945, fell to the Counterintelligence field post letters with derogatory remarks about the Soviet state and party leader Stalin in the hands: Eight years in a prison camp earned Solzhenitsyn the disrespect. The first four in a special prison for scientists in Moscow, 1950-1953 in a special camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan. Of Stalin’s death, he learned, in 1953 in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was due to his cancer suffering is irradiated.
From the dissidents to the writer
Rehabilitated, he was only in 1956. The fight against Soviet communism and of the Soviet secret service, the KGB’s literary agents-was his life’s mission. Its already in 1958, completed story “A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”, which in the comparatively liberal literary journal “Novyi Mir” appeared, caught in the Soviet Union a huge sensation. The narrative describes an ordinary day in the life of a camp inmate, full of Details, and gritty.
However, the chrustschow cal thaw was soon over. The censorship was only the appearance of narratives and prevented the order in 1964, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the order of Lenin.
The revelation of the Gulag
In may 1967 Solzhenitsyn called for in a letter to the IV., Soviet writers ‘ Congress, the abolition of censorship and the release of his novels “The first circle of hell” and “cancer ward”. In vain, his works could only appear in Translation in Western European and American publishers. The conflict with the writers ‘ Union ended in 1969, with Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion.
Historical recording from a Russian labor camp
The campaign against the intrepid writer was intensified after the KGB had made of the manuscript of “the Gulag archipelago”. With the three volumes of “Gulag archipelago” (1973 to 1976) presented Solzhenitsyn with an almost documentary representation of the Soviet camp system. He wrote with empathy, Holy wrath and bitter irony about the million-fold Suffering. The Moscow leadership was raging.
The book, which circulated in the Soviet Union only in the underground and secretly by typewriter copy was copied, hit after its release in 1974, also in the West, high waves. For many intellectuals, the so-detailed disclosure of the inhuman terror of Stalin was time to change the attitude to the Soviet Union fundamentally. Mass Communist parties were leaving.
Admonisher and a Moralist, even in exile
The Cologne is writer Heinrich Böll, who met in Moscow with the campaigning for freedom Solzhenitsyn, was one of the people who had smuggled a hand-copied copy of a century of work abroad. He received his friend to his Expatriation in Cologne, Germany, gave him at his house in long Broich a temporary home. Solzhenitsyn led the way via Switzerland to the USA, where he lived with his family on a Farm in a small town in Vermont. Here, in the seclusion of the American exile, he wrote two mammoth works of the, until now, not fully translated, the historical cycle of novels “The red wheel” – 6000 pages! and “March of seventeen”, a work that should represent the revolutionary history of ‘true’.
Two writers with a global rank: Heinrich Böll and Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn was also the most in the US to admonisher, and moralistic. Famous for his Harvard speech of 1978, in which he castigated the American consumer materialism, but also the allegedly defeatist and compromise conformist policy of Washington toward communism. “Between two millstones”, as Solzhenitsyn described in his 2005 published autobiography his exile existence between the KGB persecution and the pressures of the Western world.
Aspirants for a panslawisches Russia
In 1994, the author returned to his home. There, too, he shied away from the political discussion by no means: He criticized the oligarchs and appeared as an advocate of simple Russians. The champion of truth and freedom emphasized more and more the Orthodoxy and the Insistence on its own Russian way. Be entitled to a large Russia, with the all East-Slavic peoples, especially the Ukraine and Belarus should connect, shaped values, which are estimated by the current leadership.
Funeral service for Alexander Solzhenitsyn in August 2018
Alexander Solzhenitsyn remained as a great-Russian nationalist philosopher and critic of Western democracy and way of life, politically, a difficult to classify figure. As a Moralist the world owes him profound truths. “The line separating Good and Evil runs not between States, not between classes and parties, but right through every human heart.” Significantly, he was a writer who manifested no fear, the truth about violence and contempt for people in the Soviet system.