Alexander
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsky on 11th December, 1918. He attending
Rostov University where he studied mathematics and took a correspondence
course in literature at Moscow State University.
During
the Second World War Solzhenitsyn joined the
Red Army and rose to the rank of artillery
captain and was decorated for bravery. While serving on the German
front in 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Joseph
Stalin in a letter to a friend.
Solzhenitsyn
was found guilty and sent to a Soviet Labour
Camp in Kazakhstan. His first novel, One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a labour camp,
was initially banned but after the intervention of Nikita
Khrushchev, it was published in 1962.
His next
novel, The First Circle (1968),
described the lives of a group of scientists forced to work in a Soviet
research centre, and Cancer Ward
(1968), based on his experiences as a cancer patient, were both banned
after Nikita Khrushchev fell from
power. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet
Writers' Union and deported from Moscow.
In 1970
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but was not allowed
to collect it in Stockholm. Solzhenitsyn continued to write and his
novel on the First World War, August
1914 (1971) was banned in the Soviet Union but was published
abroad. This was followed by his reminiscences, The
Gulag Archipelago (1973). This led to his arrest and after
being charged with treason, stripped of his citizenship, and was deported
from the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn,
who collected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974, went to live
in Vermont in the USA. He continued to write and Lenin
in Zurich was published in 1975. This was followed by two
works of non-fiction, The Oak and the Calf
(1980) and The Mortal Danger
(1983) and the novel, November 1916 (1993).
In 1994
Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's
citizenship and the charge of treason was dropped. Later that year
he returned to the Soviet Union where he called for a return to pre-Bolshevik
autocratic government.
(1)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
Following
an operation, I am lying in the surgical ward of a camp hospital.
I cannot move. I am hot and feverish, but nonetheless my thoughts
do not dissolve into delerium, and I am grateful to Dr. Boris Nikolayevich
Kornfeld, who is sitting beside my cot and talking to me all evening.
The light has been turned out, so it will not hurt my eyes. There
is no one else in the ward.
Fervently
he tells me the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity.
I am astonished at the conviction of the new convert, at the ardor
of his words.
We know
each other very slightly, and he was not the one responsible for my
treatment, but there was simply no one here with whom he could share
his feelings. He was a gentle and well-mannered person. I could see
nothing bad in him, nor did I know anything bad about him. However,
I was on guard because Kornfeld had now been living for two months
inside the hospital barracks, without going outside. He had shut himself
up in here, at his place of work, and avoided moving around camp at
all.
This meant
that he was afraid of having his throat cut. In our camp it had recently
become fashionable to cut the throats of stool pigeons. This has an
effect. But who could guarantee that only stoolies were getting their
throats cut? One prisoner had had his throat cut in a clear case of
settling a sordid grudge. Therefore the self-imprisonment of Kornfeld
in the hospital did not necessarily prove that he was a stool pigeon.
It is already
late. The whole hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is finishing his story:
"And
on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no
punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved.
Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of
in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb
and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression
of yours for which you have now received this blow."
I cannot
see his face. Through the window come only the scattered reflections
of the lights of the perimeter outside. The door from the corridor
gleams in a yellow electrical glow. But there is such mystical knowledge
in his voice that I shudder.
Those were
the last words of Boris Kornfeld. Noiselessly he went into one of
the nearby wards and there lay down to sleep. Everyone slept. There
was no one with whom he could speak. I went off to sleep myself.
I was wakened
in the morning by running about and tramping in the corridor; the
orderlies were carrying Kornfeld's body to the operating room. He
had been dealt eight blows on the skull with a plasterer's mallet
while he slept. He died on the operating table, without regaining
consciousness.
(2)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison
years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential
experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication
of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was
therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor.
In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and
I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I
lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the
first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the
line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between
classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every
human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside
us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by
evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best
of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
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