Solzhenitsyn is gone

[rgraham666]

He died yesterday afternoon.

Dosvidanya.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

He died yesterday afternoon.

Dosvidanya.

A giant has passed.

 

[Salvor-Hardon]

Whoa!

I remember the first time I read Gulag Archipelago, and then actually meeting people who had actually gone through exile in Siberia and other places. I marvelled when I went back and re-read after knowing the peope first hand and always wanted to meet him.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

R.I.P.

http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/images/photo3.jpg

(click image)

 

[Varian P]

August 1914 should me mandatory reading for anyone considering endorsing a war. Or enlisting.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

A vodka toast in honor of the great author. Whatever one says about his politics, a writer of his quality when gone is a great loss indeed. Literature is truly an underappreciated art, and all of us writers should mourn the loss of one of our colleagues of the pen.

Furthermore, few showed his level of courage against a more brutal regime than he did with the infernal Soviet system.

 

[trysail]

"Our Russian pens write only in large letters. We have lived through so very much, and almost none of it has been described and called by its right name. But, for Western authors, peering through a microscope at the living cells of everyday life, shaking a test tube in the beam of a strong light, this is after all a whole epic, another ten volumes of Remembrance of Things Past: to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where prisoners are taken out to the toilet only once a day! Of course, much of the texture of this life is bound to be quite unknown to Western writers; they wouldn't realize that in this situation one solution was to urinate in your canvas hood, nor would they at all understand one prisoner's advice to another to urinate in his boot! And yet that advice was the fruit of wisdom derived from vast experience, and it didn't involve spoiling the boot and it didn't reduce the boot to the status of a pail. It meant that the boot had to be taken off, turned upside down, the boot tops turned inside out and up- and thus a cylindrical vessel was formed that constituted the much-needed container. But, at the same time, with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could enrich their literature (without in the least risking any banal repitition of the famous masters) if they only knew about the scheme of things in that same Minusinsk Prison; there was only one food bowl for every four prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per day was issued to each (there were enough mugs to go around). And it could happen that one of the four contrived to use the bowl allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pressure and then refuse to hand over his daily water ration to wash it out before lunch. What a conflict! What a clash of four personalities! What nuances! (And I am not joking. That is when the rock bottom of a human being is revealed. It is only that Russian pens are too busy to write about it, and Russian eyes don't have the time to read about it. I am not joking- because only doctors can tell us how months in such a cell will ruin a human being's health for his entire life, even if he wasn't shot under Yezhov and was rehabilitated under Kruschvev.)"

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (translated by Thomas P. Whitney)
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
New York, 1973.

"Gulag Archipelago" was published when I was an otherwise preoccupied youth. Of course, I knew of it and the literary sensation that it caused but I never got around to reading it until earlier this year. I was long overdue. On the one hand, it is an extraordinary testament- on the other, it is (unfortunately) one more book in what seems an endless series of books presenting the horrors of history.

Lest you had doubts, evil is abroad in the world.

 

[starrkers]

Gulag is still on my "to read" list.

Perhaps I should bump it up a little.

 

[Carnevil9]

His soul's-a-nappin'.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

No one his read has books since about 1970. He was the Russian John Updike.

What everyone ignores is: a Soviet prison wasnt qualitatively different from a Soviet apartment building. That is, you are shared your apartment with several people and shit in a bucket.

 

[trysail]

Russia to pay tribute to Solzhenitsyn
04/08/2008 17:49 MOSCOW, August 4 (RIA Novosti) - A ceremony to pay tribute to Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn will take place at the Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, the Solzhenitsyn foundation has said.

"The ceremony will begin at 11:00 Moscow time (7:00 GMT) and will most likely last through the day," the foundation said.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow late on Sunday at the age of 89.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin expressed their condolences to the writer's widow and his three sons. Other world leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President George W. Bush, also paid tribute to the man who did much to tell the world about the horrors of the Soviet system of labor camps, or gulags.

In a telegram from the Russian government to his family, Solzhenitsyn was called "the country's conscience and an embodiment of internal freedom and dignity," and "a man, whose books and life served as moral guidelines for the nation."

Best known for The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn fought in WWII, endured eight years in labor camps and survived cancer in the absence of almost any medication.

He first came to acclaim in Russia and the world during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's political "thaw," when his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - an account of gulag life - was published in 1962 in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the story of a labor camp inmate who almost forgets his name, remembering only his prisoner number. The man gets so used to prison horrors and perpetual humiliation that he regards them as normal life. The book caused a sensation in the Soviet Union and abroad and made Solzhenitsyn famous overnight.

The thaw eventually ended however, and Solzhenitsyn again fell out of favor with the authorities under new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. His works were seized, and the distribution of home-printed copies, or samizdat, of his stories became a criminal offense.

In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, further outraging the Soviet authorities.

Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and exiled to West Germany in 1974. He soon moved to the United States, where he spent the next 20 years working on his historical cycle of the Russian 1917 revolution, while also publishing several shorter works.

He returned to Russia in 1994, three years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

"The world has lost one of the symbols of freedom," former French President Jacques Chirac said, as quoted by the AFP agency. "Russia has lost a great fighter for the truth, who worked to reconcile Russians with their past."

Solzhenitsyn will be buried at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow on Wednesday, according to a church official.


other articles
11:09 04/08/2008 Soviet dissident writer Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

© 2005 RIA Novosti

 

[neonlyte]

Fuck! Loved the writer more than the man.

 

[trysail]

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/articles/detail.php?ID=369605&print=Y
The Moscow Times » Issue 3960 » Frontpage Top

Lessons From Solzhenitsyn's Life and Death
06 August 2008
By Viktor Sonkin

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday evening in Moscow at 89, lived a life that is almost impossible to imagine. Born after his father's death, he enlisted as a soldier after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union despite poor health. Sentenced to Stalin's camps as a political prisoner, he survived and developed his creative powers there. Diagnosed with cancer, he was operated on in a prison ward and lived cancer-free ever since. His novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" appeared in print in 1962 and immediately made him, an unknown math teacher from a provincial town, a celebrity. His personal experience and numerous letters from the readers gave him the material for "The Gulag Archipelago," the monumental nonfiction novel documenting the plight of millions of Soviet people under Stalin.

His subsequent actions, including publications abroad and open letters to the authorities, were so defiant that it was a miracle that he was not brutally suppressed. Instead, the regime, after a vicious campaign in the press, formally accused him of treason and sent him to the West. An author with a worldwide reputation, he chose a reclusive life at his home in Vermont. He lived to see the downfall of the Communist state that he so vehemently hated. In 1994, he returned to Russia by way of a train ride from the Far East to Moscow, collecting new complaints and impressions along the way.

Solzhenitsyn defied any attempt at pigeonholing him. The West heartily welcomed him as a fighter against the Evil Empire, but it was surprised to see that not everyone of anti-Soviet persuasion was a democrat. This was particularly evident in the famous lecture that Solzhenitsyn delivered at Harvard University in 1978. Much of the criticism that Solzhenitsyn directed at Western-style democracy still stands today. Moreover, many of his prophecies regarding the changing balance of power in the world are coming true.

On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn understood Western society only superficially, and many alarming things he said about it were simply not correct. Rejecting the "bad totalitarianism" of the Soviet type, Solzhenitsyn was promoting a kind of "good totalitarianism," as if there were such a thing in the world. Although many of his suggestions have since been implemented in the West, they hardly make it a better place to live.

Solzhenitsyn was fully aware of his own worth and was hostile to anyone who wasn't. He disappointed virtually all political camps in post-Soviet Russia by refusing to side with any of them. If there is a lesson to learn from his life, it is that one man can beat the system. Any system.

Viktor Sonkin, a literature columnist for The Moscow Times Context section, teaches cultural studies at Moscow State University.

 

[trysail]

This is an interesting and balanced perspective, rather than yet one more hagiography. I know Dr. Pipes from his tomes, The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.
_____________________________________
Solzhenitsyn's Troubled Prophetic Mission
07 August 2008
By Richard Pipes
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a political figure, was very much in the Russian conservative tradition -- a modern version of Dostoevsky. Like the great 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised socialism and yet had no use for Western culture with its stress on secularism, freedom and legality.

I recall very well the commencement address that he delivered 30 years ago at Harvard University. The audience of students and their families, aware of Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism, expected a warm tribute to the West -- and especially to the United States, which had granted him asylum. Instead, they were treated to a typical Russian conservative critique of Western civilization for being too legalistic and too committed to freedom, which resulted in the "weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger." At the bottom of this censure lay a wholesale rejection of the course of Western history since the Renaissance.

Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd.

In some of his historical writings, there are strong hints of anti-Semitism, a common vice of writers of the conservative-nationalist persuasion in Russia. In his 1976 book, "Lenin in Zurich," Solzhenitsyn depicts Helphand-Parvus as a slimy character who tries to persuade Lenin to return to Russia to start a revolution. In "August 1914," published in its expanded form in 1984, he explains the assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov, a thoroughly assimilated Jew, on the alleged grounds that Stolypin's plans for a better Russia promised nothing good for the Jews. Fortunately, in his last book published in 2003, "Two Hundred Years Together," an ambitious history of Jews in Russia, Solzhenitsyn unequivocally exonerated the Jewish people of responsibility for the Russian Revolution.

It is difficult to envisage what kind of a Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted. He was not unhappy about Russia's loss of its imperial possessions, yet he did not favor a state based on law and democracy. He disliked what he saw after his return to Russia in 1994, during Boris Yeltsin's rule, but, strangely enough, he came to terms with then-President Vladimir Putin and his restrictions on both democracy and the free market. Although Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejected communism, in many ways he retained a Soviet mind-set. Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent.

His comments on current events were sometimes bizarre. In 1999, he condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia in defense of Albanian Kosovo, action which he described as following the "law of the jungle: He who is mighty is completely right." He went so far as to assert that there was "no difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler." Yet he did not ask himself whether the Albanians, persecuted by the more mighty Serbs, did not have the right on their side. Nor did he compare NATO's actions in Kosovo to those of Putin in Chechnya, where the Russian military not only bombed a population that sought independence, but destroyed the region's capital, Grozny -- a city that was part of the Russian Federation.

Solzhenitsyn's assumption that he would become a prophet upon his return to Russia did not play well with the public. My impression is that he was widely considered a relic of the past. For this reason, his television program, "A Meeting with Solzhenitsyn," attracted so small of an audience that it had to be canceled. His October 1994 speech to the State Duma was tepidly received, as was his ambitious historical novel, "The Red Wheel."

When all is said and done, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered primarily for his remarkably courageous resistance to and criticism of the Soviet Union. Although many commentators claim that he was the first to alert the world to the horrors of the gulag, this is not true; there were quite a few books on this subject before the publication of his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago." Nonetheless, it is correct to say that Solzhenitsyn's works were the first to be issued from the Soviet Union and, in the case of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the first to be published in the Soviet Union. The effect of these works was immense both in the Soviet Union and abroad, helping to discredit morally the communist regime among those who still entertained illusions about it. In this manner, Solzhenitsyn contributed to the Soviet Union's ultimate collapse.

No one can deprive Solzhenitsyn of this honor. But when it comes to the recommendations he made to his compatriots, many doubts remain. Russians obviously have little in common with the Oriental nations; by race, religion and high culture, they belong to the West. Therefore, when Solzhenitsyn rejects Western values as inapplicable to his country, he leaves it in a cultural limbo -- it belongs nowhere and only to itself. This is a recipe for isolation, and isolation breeds aggressiveness.
____________________
Richard Pipes is professor of history, emeritus at Harvard University and author, most recently, of "Russian Conservatism and Its Critics," which has just been published in Russian translation.