Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Aug 6 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE WILL not be remembered for the laughter he brought us, but the man with the ever-mournful face had an intellect so big that it became the conscience of many, carrying the sorrows and hate of a world shredded by doctrine and greed.

He was a great writer – a great Russian writer and a great world writer.

In his native Russia, squeezed by Communism, people read him voraciously and his words gave them comfort and courage.

In the West, where he lived after being exiled, he was read as well, but in a different spirit.

And his books rested like totems on the shelves of the rich.

For Alexander Solzhenitsyn hated the brutalities of dictatorial Communism, but he could never accept the hedonism of a West, which, to him, seemed to have lost its soul in pursuit of quick gratification and commercial demands.

However, his early life suggested a man dedicated to the ideals of the Russian Revolution. He was born in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. His father, who had served as an artillery officer in the Imperial Russian Army throughout World War I, died in a hunting accident soon after his birth. Alexander was brought up by his mother, Taisia, a stenographer.

A romantic youth, big-boned and rangy, with a love of the past and the Russian Orthodox Church, though he became a Marxist, he studied maths at Rostov University, where he won a Stalin scholarship, while courting Natalya Reshetovskaya.

His Communist credentials were strengthened in World War II when he served the Red Army, being decorated twice.

But, during this time, Smersh read a letter which he had written to another soldier, criticising Stalin’s policies. He was sentenced to a labour camp and perpetual exile.

In this time of deprivation and cruelty, Solzhenitsyn somehow managed to write his novels, the First Circle and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

These would be published, along with Cancer Ward and other books, after his release in 1956 under Kruschev’s reforms. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a prison book, led to exile in 1974.

He stayed in the USA, an uncomfortable figure in the world of rock and roll, cola and advertisements, returning home in 1994. His three sons are US citizens.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, writer;born December 11, 1918,died August 3, 2008