Solzhenitsyn: A literary giant

Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shone a light on the inhuman world of the Soviet gulags, died late Sunday, the Itar-Tass news agency said, citing his son Stepan. He was 89.

The Nobel laureate died of heart failure at his Moscow home at 11:45 pm (1945 GMT), the writer’s son said.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 after writing harrowing works about the Soviet Union’s system of labour camps, where he spent eight years from 1945.

Solzhenitsyn toiled obsessively to unearth the darkest secrets of Stalinist rule and ultimately dealt a crippling blow to the Soviet Union’s authority.

Born to a single mother in 1918 amid the bloody aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was initially a loyal Communist.

Yet he went on to undermine the regime’s moral foundations, his writings energizing dissent at home and in the West.

Recognizable later in life by his flowing beard and ascetic dress, Solzhenitsyn set himself in the prophetic tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky.

First though he had to enter the living hell of the Gulag, a vast prison system that stretched from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to the steppes of Kazakhstan and swallowed up millions of arrested people on the flimsiest of pretences.

Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the camps in 1945 and was to go on to survive cancer and a KGB assassination attempt.

By Gulag standards, conditions at the camp near Moscow where he initially worked were relatively tolerable.

But he deliberately exchanged them for back-breaking physical toil in a camp in Kazakhstan so as to share the lot of ordinary prisoners, a typical act of self-mortification that almost killed him.

He was released in February 1953, a few weeks before Stalin’s death. He spent three more years in internal exile in Kazakhstan, contracted and overcame cancer, before moving back to Russia as a schoolteacher.

Then in 1962 he burst onto the world of literature with “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.

A slim volume published with official approval during the thaw under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, it described the world of the forced labour camps.

After its publication in the magazine Novy Mir, two subsequent editions totalling 850,000 copies sold out immediately.

“Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” followed, both appearing in English in 1968.

Amid a crackdown under Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev, Russians for 20 years could read the texts only in clandestine editions.

But already by 1970 Solzhenitsyn’s impact was so great that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He accepted the award but refused to travel to receive it for fear of not being allowed to return home.

By now Solzhenitsyn was sacrificing everything to his massive portrait of the camps, “The Gulag Archipelago,” covertly collecting information from 227 former prisoners.

The authorities were at a loss to know what to do about him.

In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who wrote an open letter to Pravda newspaper supporting him. Rostropovich, who died in April 2007, was to suffer for their closeness, eventually being forced into exile.

The next year Solzhenitsyn suffered a bout of “heat stroke” which was later revealed to have been caused by ricin, a poison administered surreptitiously in a crowded shop.

Finally the authorities discovered manuscripts for “The Gulag Archipelago” and in 1974 Solzhenitsyn was expelled by KGB chief Yury Andropov.

After a spell in Switzerland he moved to a remote village in Vermont, in the United States, where he devoted himself to his “Red Wheel” cycle, a fictionalised history of the run-up to the Revolution.

The world now discovered a Solzhenitsyn who was highly critical of Western ways and called for moral renewal based on Christian values.

His spectacular return to his homeland in 1994 proved something of an anti-climax. The new Russia was as alien to Solzhenitsyn as the United States had been, a finding he shared with audiences in gloomy televized harangues.

In June last year, then Russian president Vladimir Putin awarded Solzhenitsyn the State Prize, Russia’s highest honour, praising his devotion to the “fatherland” in a lavish ceremony at the Kremlin.

Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natalya accepted the award on behalf of her husband, who was unable to attend the ceremony.

Speaking via a video message, Solzhenitsyn said he was “flattered by the attention to my work brought by this Russian State Prize.”

“Until the end of my life I can hope that the historical material... collected by me and presented to my readers, enters the consciousness and memory of my fellow countrymen,” he said.

A complete edition of Solzhenitsyn’s works, including unpublished writings, began to be published in 2006, with the last volume due out in 2010. His wife said at the time she did not expect her husband to live to see the last edition. Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev has sent the family his condolences.

AFP