Alexandre Soljenitsyne

Alexandre Issaïevitch Soljenitsyne (in; ), born the December 11th 1918 with Kislovodsk (Russia), is a dissenting novelist and Russian, author of the Gulag Archipelago .

Biography

Good pupil at the school and the university of sciences of Rostov-sur-le-Don, it studied the literature and the communist doctrines which it knew well. He itself was condemned in 1945 to 8 years of prison in the camps of work for counter-revolutionary activity, after having maintained a critical correspondence with regard to the Stalinist policies. According to Soljenitsyne, the war with the Nazi Germany during the Second world war could have been prevented if the Soviet government had found a compromise with Hitler. Soljenitsyne showed the Soviet government and Joseph Stalin to have been more responsible than Hitler for the terrible consequences of the war on the Soviet people. He was condemned at the time like traitor. To its exit of the camp in 1953, it is sent in perpetual exile to the Kazakhstan. He is rehabilitated in 1956 and settles with Riazan where he teaches physical sciences.

Author in the USSR

It is its work One day of Ivan Denissovitch , published in 1962 in the Soviet review Novi Mir , thanks to the authorization of Nikita Khrouchtchev in person, which acquires an international repute to him. However, three years after, it is impossible for him to publish anything in Union of the Soviet socialist republics and its novels the First Circle and the House of the Cancer patients , as well as the first volume of its historical epopee the red Wheel , appear in Occident where it receives the Nobel Prize of literature in 1970, reward which he will be able to perceive only four years later after being expelled of the USSR. It indeed could not go to Stockholm of fear of being deposed of its Soviet nationality, the Swedish government having refused to transmit the price to him to its embassy of Moscow. Its life becomes a permanent conspiracy to steal the right to write in spite increasingly assiduous monitoring of the KGB. Part of its files is seized at one of his/her friends in September 1965, and it misses being assassinated in August 1971 (by a “Bulgarian Parapluie”). One of its closer collaborators has escaped accuracy with a throttling and an car accident. In December 1973, appears in Paris (in Russian version) the Gulag Archipelago where it exposes the Soviet system concentrationnaire Gulag, that it lived of the interior, and totalitarian nature of the mode Staliniste. Written between 1958 and 1967 on tiny sheets of paper buried with one in friendly gardens, a copy had been sent in Occident to escape the Censure. It decided its publication after one of its assistances was found hung: she had acknowledged with the KGB the hiding-place where a specimen of work was. This publication is worth to him to be deposed of its citizenship and to be expelled of Soviet Union in February 1974.

Author in exile

It settles initially in Switzerland, then emigrates in the United States. After one agitated period of interviews and speech (like the famous speech of Harvard pronounced in 1978), in the United States, Soljenitsyne was often invited to important conferences. It was, for example, a speaker with the congress of the trade union of AFL-CIO in 1975. July 15th, 1975, it was even invited to give a conference on the world situation to the American Senate.

It is withdrawn with its family in the Vermont to write the work of which it dreamed since its youth: the red Wheel . Historical epopee which recalls the sinking of Russia in the revolutionary madness, it counts several thousands of pages.

Return in Russia

After the fall of the USSR, its Russian nationality is restored to him and the Gulag Archipelago, published. Via the France (inauguration of the memorial of the Lucs-on-Boulogne (the Vendée) the 25 September 1993), it returns then to Russia the Friday the 27th May 1994 where it resides since. Until 1998, it preserves an intense social activity, has its own television program, voyage through Russia, meets a multitude of people. The disease stopped this activity.

Today, Soljenitsyne lives withdrawn close to Moscow, in the middle of its family. The Soljenitsyne Funds helps old the zeks and their families stripped in their slope of the pensions, by paying drugs. After having believed that he would play a decisive part in Russia post-Communist, then, disappointed, after having it already more or less " buried, the Russians lately seem to be interested again in its figure and to redécouvrir the value of its politico-social writings. An international symposium on its work to him was devoted in December 2003 to Moscow.

June 12th, 2007, the president Vladimir Poutine pays homage to Soljenitsyne by decreeing prestigious Prix of State to him.

Friend of Philippe de Villiers, president of the general advice of the the Vendée, this one baptized a college of Aizenay Collège Alexandre Soljenitsyne , inaugurated by the son of the writer.

A committed intellectual

Its conferences, held during its stay in occident, supported the positions more the anticommunists. Thus, it conducted campaign so that the United States intervenes in Vietnam . After 40 years of the mode of António de Oliveira Salazar then of Marcelo Caetano with the Portugal, when officers of left within the army seized the power in 1974 and that the Révolution of the eyelets took place, Soljenitsyne started to lead countryside for an American military intervention to Portugal because, for him, this country was likely to join the Warsaw Pact. Soljenitsyne also regretted that independence was granted to the African colonies of Portugal (Mozambique, Angola…) after a fatal war maintained in writing pad by the Soviet Union .

The principal aspect of the speeches of Soljenitsyne was its war without slackening against socialism: insisting on the million people carried out in Soviet Union, in particular during the Great Stalinist purgings, but also on the Americans imprisoned and reduced in slavery to North-Vietnam.

The American journalists who wrote in favor of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union were shown at once by Soljenitsyne of potential traitors . Soljenitsyne also supported, under Ronald Reagan, the arms race against the Soviet Union who was, according to him, more powerful “ in tanks and the planes from 5 to 7 times higher compared to the United States ”. He also claimed that the atomic weapons were two to three or even five times more in Soviet Union than in the United States.

A long time symbol of intellectual resistance to Soviet oppression, Alexandre Soljenitsyne is regularly attacked. The operations of destabilization in its opposition practically never ceased since the years 1960. A zek (held), handled by the KGB, showed it to be an adviser of the communist authorities, and for that wrote a false denunciation. The KGB made write some books against him by former friends, like his former editor, Alec Flagon, and even by his first wife. During its literary career, no charge was saved to him: successively or at the same time shown to favor nationalist, tsarist, ultra-orthodoxe, anti-semite or Israel, traitor, objective accomplice of Gestapo, the CIA, the freemasons, the French secret services and even of the KGB. Soljénitsyne answered these charges by juxtaposing them so that they are cancelled between them, in its literary autobiography, the grain fallen between the grinding stones , and still recently in an article of Litératournaïa Gazeta, the daubers do not seek the light .

In fact, its political opinions, forged throughout its life by a destiny out of the commun run, are too complex to be thus labelled. He preaches strong and independent Russia, while being opposed on several occasions to the war in Chetchnia . He does not believe that the country can pass, of the day in the following day, of a totalitarian mode to a mode of Western the democracy type. If it is favorable to a presidential capacity extremely, it is especially in favor of the local democracy, rather near to the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville: for Soljenitsyne, the true democracy is not consisted by the electoral system but a fabric of local associations managing the businesses independently of the central capacity which, it, should deal only with the national businesses (armed, politics foreign, etc). He is an enthusiastic patriot, but not a nationalist: he for example was always opposed to the Guerre as Chetchnia. He had a comment favorable to president Putin at the time of his come to power, hoping for of him significant changes, then took his distances quickly. Alexandre Soljenitsyne forever contradicted the charges of royalism carried against him by the Soviet capacity. Its orthodoxe religious convictions also cause mistrust in the progressists mediums.

According to Moshe Lewin, which relays these criticisms, “as a long time as it Soljenitsyne carried out its battle of the interior, the foreign observers supposed that it fought for a democratization of the system. But, once Soljenitsyne exiled in Occident, they quickly understood that the anticommunism was not automatically carrying democracy. The combat of Soljenitsyne was in fact with the service of a deeply antidemocratic ideology, which mingled with the elements of “national-state control” with antiquated features of the orthodoxe religion, but with the concept even of Democracy. In short there was at Soljenitsyne a major attachment with an authoritarianism of its vintage, which, if it were not formulated during its first appearances on the public stage, developed during its combat”.

The American historian Richard Pipes, whose work on the history of the Soviet Russia had been qualified by Soljenitsyne of “Polish version of the Russian history” (Pipes is of Polish origin), answered this one by taxing it with anti-semitism and ultra-nationalism. In 1985, Pipes thus developed its matter in its criticism of a news of Soljenitsyne, August 1914 : “Each culture has a clean form of anti-semitism. In the case of Soljenitsyne, this one is not racial. That has nothing to do with blood. It is not racist, the question is basically nun and cultural. It presents many resemblances to Dostoïevski, which was an enthusiastic Christian, a patriot and a savage anti-semite. Soljenitsyne is placed incontestably in the vision of the Revolution defended by the Russian extreme-right-hand side, like a creation of the Jews. ”

It thus was the object during all its literary course of charges of anti-semitism because of the publication of the name of the administrative persons in charge of Gulag, of its historical work on the revolution Bolshevik and, more recently, because of its opposition to the Russian oligarchs and of the publication of its historical work Two centuries together on the relations between Juifs and Russians of 1795 to 1995: the writer and old dissenting Soviet Vladimir Voinovich thus tried to show the anti-Jewish character of this book in a polemical study. In France, the historian Trotskiste Jean-Jacques Marie devoted an article to each volume of Two centuries together , which it describes as “Bible anti-semite”. According to Jean-Jacques Marie, “Soljenitsyne exposes, in Two centuries together , a design of the history of the Jews in worthy Russia to appear in a historical handbook of falsification” by restoring a history of the pogroms “such as she was seen by the police force tsarist”. The British historian Robert Service however defended the book of Soljenitsyne, asserting that a study of the place of the Jews in the party Bolshevik was fully justified and that Trotsky itself had criticized their over-representation in the leading authorities of the party.

Works

The dating of works of Alexandre Soljenitsyne is difficult to establish with precision, because the majority of them knew a very long gestation and several versions (including sometimes a quasi complete rewriting). In this direction, the epigraph placed at the beginning of the First Circle is significant: Writes of 1955 to 1958. Disfigured in 1964. Rewritten in 1968 .

Works

  • One day of Ivan Denissovitch (1962)

  • the House of the cancer patients (1968)
  • Rights of the writer (1969)
  • the First circle (started in 1955, final version in 1968) ISBN 2213011575
  • August 14, first node (series of books (nodes) in several volumes (volumes) republished in 1983 pennies the common title the red Wheel) (1972)
  • the Gulag Archipelago (volumes I and II) ( 1974)
  • the oak and the calf (1975)
  • American Speeches (1975)
  • Of the voices under the debris (1975)
  • Lénine in Zurich (1975)
  • the Gulag Archipelago (volume III) (1976)
  • Flame with the wind (1977)
  • Decline of courage (1978)
  • Message of exile (1979)
  • the error of the Occident (1980)
  • the tanks knows the truth (1982)
  • Pluralist the (1983)
  • the red Wheel, volume 2: Second node - November 16 (1985)
  • How to refit our Russia? (1990)
  • Invisible the (1992)
  • the red Wheel, volume 3: Third node - March 17 (4 volumes) (1993 - 1998)
  • the “Russian Problem” at the end of the XXe century (1994)
  • Ego (1995)
  • Our young people (1997)
  • the Grain fallen between the grinding stones (1998), ED. Beech, 500 pages.
  • Russia under the avalanche (1998)
  • Two accounts of war (2000)
  • Two centuries together, 1795-1995, volume 1: Jews and Russians before the revolution (2002)
  • Two centuries together, 1917-1972, volume 2: Jews and Russians for the Soviet period (2003)
  • Drafts of exile - the grain fallen between the grinding stones, volume 2,1979-1994 , translates of Russian by Francoise Lesourd, (2005)
  • Aime the revolution; Eyes dessillés , (2007)
  • Reflections on the revolution of February, (2007)
  • One minute per day, (2007)
  • the red Wheel: Fourth node: April 17 (to be appeared)

Alexandre Soljenitsyne also wrote during the Sixties of the news published in the review Novi Mir . Some were published in France in the collections:

  • the house of Matriona (1963) which contains also " The Unknown De Krétchétovka" And " For the Good And Cause"
  • Zacharie escarcelle (1971) the

See too

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