Alexandr Solzhenitsyn passed away this week. He was born on December 11 1918, in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, and grew up a loyal communist and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941. As a student he edited the Komsomol newspaper and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement.Back in the day when I had literary ambitions, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work stood there forbiddingly telling me I didn't have the kinds of life experiences from which to base great fiction upon. I would start reading Gulag Archipelago and just want to cringe and die at the thought that I had something important to say. Now I know better - I don't - which is why I write this blog. Yes, there were other writers with more style or more insight, or more moral authority, but Sozhenitsyn was the living literary witness to the devastation of Stalinism. If Orwell was able to describe the mechanism of such brutality in Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn was the man who copped the brunt of that mechanism.It was while at university that he began to write short stories, and drafted the plan for an immense Tolstoyan novel intended to celebrate the October revolution. But his devotion to socialist principles and indiscreet hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule led to his undoing.
Shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the labour camps.
For many years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day but the daring One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps were described as "a literary miracle". Within weeks his name was known all over the world.
Last night the Russian government expressed its condolences over his death. "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family," a Kremlin spokesman said.
As such, it's kind of weird to see how conservatives took Solzhenitysn to their collective bosoms as the leading light of anti-communism. It sort of glosses over his literary achievement. Of course that all got lost in the shuffle of Perestroika, Glasnost and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. You don't see the same conservatives lining to save the other people on the planet who are caught in other awkward, awful situations. Some of them even create them, like Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, but we won't get into that today.
So now Solzhenitsyn is gone, you sort of wonder if his work is going to continue to carry that weight going forwards into history. How much relevance do such texts hold in a world given over to iPhone releases and instant gratification.
Anyway, I'm sort of meditating on all this and drawing a blank. Does anybody care to offer a comment?
1 comment:
I must admit I had his labour-camp book on my bookshelf all through my angst-ridden teenage years, but I never got round to reading it. I probably figured I had enough angst of my own to want to endure a literary distillation of 8 years in the freezing, goolie-numbing winds of the gulag. Sorry Solzy. Maybe now I will give it a go.
I guess his critique of Stalinism is still relevant in some respects, because Stalin's evil deeds are still bearing fruit as we speak. His policy of exiling whole populations from the Caucasus, and replacing them with Russian settlers, has led to provinces of Georgia, which now have large ethnic Russian populations, trying to break away. Hence the current conflict, with militias running around terrorising Georgians, under escort from the Russian army.
Ironic since Stalin was Georgian himself. Nasty piece of work that man. I'm not taking the side of Georgia though - still haven't forgiven them for the Golden Fleece debacle with Jason et al.
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