Patriarch Aleksei Prays for the Repose of the Soul of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow and all the Russias expressed his condolences to the family and friends of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away in the early hours of Monday in his 90^th year. “I pray that the Ruler of Life, our Lord Jesus Christ, shall grant repose to the soul of the newly-departed Servant of God Aleksandr in the heavenly mansions, ‘where there is neither sickness, sighing, or grief, but, life everlasting’”, according to the message of condolence sent to the author’s widow, Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyna, and posted on the official website of the MP.

His Holiness emphasised that Solzhenitsyn faced many trials in his life, and he faced them “in all humility and Christian merit. He shouldered the burdens of World War II, he suffered the unrighteousness of imprisonment and the camps, and he also endured exile from our native motherland”, the patriarch said. In addition, His Holiness stated that Solzhenitsyn continued to speak out about the truth and the tragic fate of 20^th century Russia even in his forced exile in America, and his seminal and bright works earned deep love and respect from not only the people of Russia, but from many in foreign lands.

“Aleksandr Isaevich attempted to do everything possible to preserve Russian literature, to ensure the survival of its traditions. He took an active role in the public life of our country, he took a stand on the issues of the day as an involved citizen, and he tackled the questions of the social, cultural, and spiritual development of a new and reinvigorated Russia”, Patriarch Aleksei said. He added that Solzhenitsyn “was the initiator of many good ideas and projects” and that Solzhenitsyn promoted the revival of the ancient traditions of the people and the retention of the Russian cultural heritage with great enthusiasm. “He intended to do much more before his decease, however, this summer proved to be the last one in his life”, His Holiness said.

The body of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shall lie in state at the Russian Academy of Sciences starting 11.00 Moscow time (07.00 GMT, 03.00 EDT) Tuesday. The funeral and burial shall take place on Wednesday in the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in Moscow.

4 August 2008

Olga Lipich

RIA-Novosti

http://www.rian.ru/society/20080804/115658206.html

Solzhenitsyn: Do not fight “against” something, fight “for” something

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Vechnaya Pamyat, Rab Bozhii Aleksandr!

In Moscow, in the early hours on Monday, the outstanding Russian writer and Nobel Prize laureate passed away in his home in Moscow. According to his family, the cause of death was an acute heart attack. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was only a few months short of his 90^th birthday. Because of his deteriorating health, he was prevented from appearing much on television lately. Nevertheless, he did not use this as an excuse to stop working, and he was preparing an anthology of his complete œuvre for publication. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the publication of the revision in English of his novel The First Circle (v Kruge Pervom).

According to the writer Aleksei Varlamov, one of the main strengths of Solzhenitsyn laid in the fact that he fought “for” something, he did not fight “against” something. “He lived throughout the 20^th century; he survived some of the harshest and most tragic times in our history. He held us up, perhaps, he saved us, but, we did not understand it [at the time]”, Mr Varlamov said.

For many decades, people could read Solzhenitsyn’s works only in typewritten or manuscript copies (so-called samizdat, “self-publication”: editor’s note), all the time understanding that if one read his book on camp life, one ran the very real risk of running afoul of the authorities. In most people’s eyes, he was a prophet. However, to reach this position, Solzhenitsyn had to pass through all the “circles” of the Stalinist prisons and camps, overcome a terrible disease, and find the courage to talk about this phenomenon through the prism of his personal experiences. Now, we must say that the departure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn marked the closing of an epoch in literature.

From the First to the Second World

Even before he experienced the fire of the prisons and the camps, the writer was no stranger to adversity. Born into an Orthodox family in Kislovodsk, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lost his father before he was born. His childhood was during the time of the Civil War, which completely ruined his family. At the age of 19, he conceived of writing a novel about the period of the First World War. But, he had to put off his dreams of literary accomplishment, for he had to work to support himself, and he enrolled in Rostov University at the physics and mathematics faculties. In 1940, whilst he was still a student, he married Natalia Reshetovskaya, another student.

His second formation, in literature, Solzhenitsyn thought, was finished. Then, World War II broke out, and Aleksandr Isaevich served in the artillery, where he passed the entire war. As a result he earned several military decorations… and eight years in the camps for a careless statement in a letter to a friend about Iosif Stalin. Solzhenitsyn was arrested directly on the front. Eventually, he was sent to a sharashka (special research institute staffed with political prisoners: editor’s note) in Marfino. Prisoners with long sentences under the political articles worked in secret NIIs (Scientific Research Institute), and it was here, specifically, that Solzhenitsyn began to keep notes on cigarette paper that he used in his novel The First Circle.

Pyotr Doronin, a fellow prisoner in the gulag, said that Solzhenitsyn was always circumspect in his conversation; he knew that one had to do certain things in order to survive, but, the main thing was not to become distorted and bent in the struggle for survival. Mr Doronin also related Solzhenitsyn’s interactions with the camp-guards. “We constantly shot the bull with the warders. They became convinced of our influence amongst the other prisoners, and they tried to make us informers, that is, they tried to make us rat finks. First, they tried to cajole us, then, their pressure became unbearable. Solzhenitsyn had a direct answer to it all. ‘I am not for sale!’”

Miraculous Healing

Solzhenitsyn did not escape one of the more common maladies of prisoners, cancer of the stomach. In December 1953, the doctors told him that he had only three more weeks to live. However, after being freed on 5 March 1953 from the camps, the very day that Stalin died, he went for radiation therapy in a Tashkent hospital clinic and he made a full recovery. Quite a few people say that his miraculous healing from cancer led Solzhenitsyn to write about his experiences in the camps.

After his physical rehabilitation was completed, he settled in Ryazan, where he taught mathematics and physics in the local secondary schools, and he began to start seriously writing during this period. In 1962, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir (New World), one of the most prestigious “thick journals” (Soviet slang for a literary magazine: editor’s note), accepted his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den Ivana Denisovicha) for publication. This work became a revelation to many. Even though Solzhenitsyn was forced to tone down the text to pass it past the censors, he became a famous writer overnight. In 1964, he was even nominated for the Lenin Prize.

Expulsion

Nevertheless, the “thaw” soon ended, and the theme of the camps and sharashkas became taboo again. For several years, Solzhenitsyn attempted to defend himself from attacks, but, nothing helped, for in 1969 he was expelled from the Writer’s Union. By that time, he had already completed work on his magnum opus, an encyclopaedia of camp life entitled The Gulag Archipelago (GULag Arhipelag). In 1970, a momentous event occurred, he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and the academy cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. This “politically-hostile” award cost Solzhenitsyn his membership in the Writers’ Union of the USSR, and it led to his exile four years later from his native motherland.

The Nobel Prize address of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was published in 1972. It concludes with the words, “One word of truth is worth more than the entire world”. He was only able to accept his award after he was banished from the USSR in 1974. At first, he lived in Zürich in the home another Nobel laureate, Heinrich Böll. Later, Solzhenitsyn settled in the state of Vermont in the USA, where he completed the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and he continued his work on a cycl3e of novels on the time of the Russian Revolution entitled The Red Wheel (Krasnoye Koleso). He called this cycle “a tragic history of how Russians themselves destroyed their own past and their future as well”. In 1972, Solzhenitsyn feared it would take 20 years to complete the project, and that he would not have the time to finish it before his death. The name of one of his last works is most appropriate, It is Up to Us to Rebuild Russia. Feasible Considerations.

Return

In May 1994, Aleksandr Isaevich returned to Russia. His train travelled throughout Russia, he was met as a conquering hero at each stop, and the journalists stuck close to him throughout his tour of Russia so as not to miss a word the writer said. “It was just an experiment, you will forgive me for the cruelty of this word, and no one believes in it anymore. Well, there was Sakharov… that is understandable. However, to act without knowing how the test will end, that there would be a Nobel Prize, that there would be a return to Russia, to accept the consequences for standing for the truth, for the motherland, and for patriotism… such is what we need so urgently now”, said Yevgeny Mironov, Honoured Artist of Russia, who played the main role in the TV series based on Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle.

A radically-changed Russia met him when he returned. In spring 1993, Vladimir Lukin, the Russian Ambassador to the USA, asked Solzhenitsyn to give his impressions of “the current events in Russia”. In reply, Aleksandr Isaevich said, “In the last 14 months, people have been thrown down into complete misery and desperation. At such a time, it is dangerous to implement radical political changes”. On several occasions, Solzhenitsyn tried to influence the course of events in Russia. In one of his conversations with President Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn proposed the separation of Chechnya from Russia and the land on the left-bank of the Terek to remain Russian (for it was a traditional Cossack stanitsa: editor’s note), with the simultaneous deportation of convicted Chechen criminals from Russia.

However, Aleksandr Isaevich remained one of the leaders of the Orthodox-patriotic revival in Russia. After he was told of the death of the writer, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said, “Aleksandr Isaevich, both for his contemporaries and for our descendants, shall remain a model of internal freedom and human dignity. He boldly spoke out to the Russian government and to the Western countries in the voice of the people. He did not fear to expose falsehood, even if this was against the trend of the time or against the prevailing public opinion. His words and participation in the Russian public dialogue shall be sorely missed”.

4 August 2008

RIA-Novosti

http://www.rian.ru/review/20080804/115646599.html

Russia to Pay Tribute to Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian author and patriot, Nobel Prize laureate, the soul and conscience of a generation

A ceremony to pay tribute to Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will take place at the Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, the Solzhenitsyn Foundation said. “The ceremony will begin at 11.00 Moscow time (7.00 GMT, 3.00 EDT) 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.

President Dmitri 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 US 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 labour-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 (GULag Arhipelag), Solzhenitsyn fought in WWII, endured eight years in labour-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 (Odin den Ivana Denisovicha), an account of gulag life, was published in 1962 in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir (New World). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the story of a labour-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 favour 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 offence. 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 USSR.

“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.

4 August 2008

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/culture/20080804/115673613.html

Editor’s Note:

Aleksandr Isaevich was one of the most towering figures of the 20th century, certainly, the USA produced none to equal him. Aleksandr Isaevich exhibited CHARACTER, that is what it is all about. The novels… they are but an ornament. He was one of the few to show ABSOLUTE integrity. That is very rare in this world, especially in the areas overrun by American hedonist thought. You may follow Aleksandr Isaevich or you may follow the charlatans of “therapeutic psychology”. I shall follow Aleksandr Isaevich, what about you? (Is this really a choice? Need I even ask?)

BMD

Writer and Dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Passed Away

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian author, Nobel Prize laureate, the greatest man of the Soviet era

The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away in Moscow in his 90^th year. His relatives told the press that the reason for his death was an acute heart attack. President Dmitri Medvedev expressed his condolences to the wife and sons of the author.

For several decades, the only way that one could pronounce the name “Solzhenitsyn” was in a hushed whisper, and his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULag) was published abroad and circulated in Russia in thousands of typed and manuscript copies (samizdat, “self-published”: editor’s note). One could only read it at night, and it was a very risky undertaking, indeed. For many, this book was a revelation, and for many it was a reminder of the nightmarish Soviet labour-camp system. It gives Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a special place in Russian literature, for he was a man who dared to mock those who did such things, things that most people even fear to think about.

Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918 in Kislovodsk, and he and his mother moved to Rostov-on-Don six years later. He began to write at an early stage, for already in 1937 he had conceived the idea of his future historical novel-cycle The Red Wheel (Krasnoe Koleso). His dabbling in hack writing did not prevent him from finishing his studies at the physics and mathematics faculties of Rostov University. After he finished his degree, he served at the front in World War II. He served for the entire war and earned several military decorations.

However, his military distinctions did not save Solzhenitsyn. In February 1945 he was arrested for sharply criticising the speeches of Iosif Stalin and Soviet literature in his letters to Nikolai Vitkevich. The authorities sentenced Solzhenitsyn to eight year’s confinement in a hard-labour camp and eternal exile [from Moscow] afterwards. At first, he was confined in a camp in Novy Ierusalime, then, he was part of a building crew on an apartment house in Moscow, and, luckily, he was sent to a secret sharashka (officially, NII (Scientific Research Institute) in the Moscow settlement of Marfino. Finally, he spent three years, from 1950 to 1953, in a hard-labour camp in Kazakhstan.

Specifically, it was his years in the camps, and, based on the evidence of witnesses, his miraculous healing from cancer that impelled him to write the truth about the life in the camps, and these experiences formed the author that we know so well, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Recently, his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den Ivana Denisovicha) was added to the required secondary school curriculum. It described, to the smallest detail, the life of one Soviet prisoner, the zek (“prisoner”, Russian slang: editor’s note) number Shch-854. Even the hero himself sometimes forgets that he has a real name, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, which makes the camp horrors he survives even more horrible. Ivan Denisovich tells of his nightmare and humiliations as though he were describing something outside of himself.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich came as a shock to some, as a slap to others, and for a third group, it was truth that had, at long last, come to light. Although Solzhenitsyn had to tone down the work slightly to get it past the censors for publication, it made him a famous writer overnight. In 1964, it was nominated for the Lenin Prize. At first, his novella Matryona’s Place (Matreninomu Dvoru) was banned, then, it was allowed, but, any mention of the author’s name was forbidden.

His semi-autobiographical novels The Cancer Ward (Rakovy Korpus) and The First Circle (v Kruge Pervom) tested the patience of the Soviet authorities to the limit. The so-called “thaw” ended, and the theme of the camps and sharashkas became forbidden once again. Russians read Solzhenitsyn’s books in samizdat, and they seriously risked sharing the fate of their literary heroes. In this sense, the popularity of the recently-filmed serial The First Circle can be seen as a manifestation of bitter irony.

For several years, Solzhenitsyn attempted to defend his rights, and attempted to get some of his works published, but, nothing helped. In 1969, he was expelled from the Writer’s Union. By that time, he had completed his main work, an encyclopaedia of camp life, The Gulag Archipelago (GULag Arhipelag). The Gulag Archipelago sometimes seems to be nothing but an encyclopaedia, deprived of all feeling, only facts, nothing but the facts. Fear, arrival, “Voronkov”, departure, the tears of relatives, the silence of neighbours, the lives of those who remained in freedom, and the lives of those who forgot what freedom was, the convoy-guards, the children in the camp, and the constant death… none of it appears surprising. The Gulag Archipelago is a description of an ideal system, from which there is no escape, a parallel world, about which almost all guess, but, they prefer not to note it until that world intrudes on their own. The seven books of The Gulag Archipelago must resemble to the reader the seven seals of the Book of Revelation of St John the Theologian, the book by which the Lord shall judge humanity on the Judgement Day.

On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and after 24 hours, he was expelled from the USSR to the then-West Germany. First, he lived in Zürich, then, he moved to the USA. He did not cease to work during his exile; he wrote both articles and artistic works, including verses. His predilection to religious philosophy, his tendency towards the writing of epic novels, and his long snowy beard, unavoidably caused comparisons with Lev Tolstoy. He received the halo of a prophet for creating the glorious Gulag Archipelago. The name of one of his last works is most appropriate, It is Up to Us to Rebuild Russia. Feasible Considerations.

In May 1994, Solzhenitsyn triumphantly returned as a prophet to Russia. The attention the media gave this event was enormous, the journalists stuck close to him throughout his tour of Russia so as not to miss a word the writer said. However, this triumph was temporary. A changed homeland faced him. Solzhenitsyn, his health deteriorating, no longer could work at his full intensity, but, the works he managed to publish met with a rather cool reception. His monumental 200 Years Together, which focused on the Jewish problem in Russia, met with much sharp criticism.

However, even now, we can say with confidence that Solzhenitsyn is not a simple “great writer”, and his death is not the simple death of a “great person”. His death is the end of an era, the memory of which is concentrated for us in an encyclopaedic and powerful form in his books.

4 August 2008

RIA-Novosti

http://rian.ru/society/20080804/115600827.html