Focus on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's life and The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Résumé du document

The author of The Gulag Archipelago, born a hundred years ago on December 11, 1918, in the very early Bolshevik Russia, is a Russian writer and dissident of the Soviet regime. Alexander Solzhenitsyn experienced civil war, Stalinist gulags, exile and disintegration of the former USSR. It is a writer who through these books presents the context of the cold war as it really was a tug between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny.

Extraits

[...] On November Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers of the USSR. Then, his novels The First Circle and The Cancer Pavilion, as well as the first volume of his historical epic The Red Wheel, appear in the West and earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, a reward he will receive for only four years later, after being expelled from the USSR. He was unable to travel to Stockholm for fear of being stripped of his Soviet nationality and unable to return to the USSR, as the Swedish government refused to hand him the prize at his Moscow embassy. [...]

[...] After a night spent in a cell, he is read out of the decree depriving him of Soviet citizenship and ordering his deportation. Twelve hours after his arrest, he is sent by special plane to Frankfurt. In the USSR, however, his texts continue to be disseminated secretly in the form of samizdat. Refugees in Western Europe, he moved to the United States in Vermont, where he spent twenty years in exile. A prominent figure in the Soviet dissident, he distinguished himself by a sharp criticism of Western materialism, notably in his 1978 Harvard Discourse on the Decline of Courage. [...]

[...] Focus on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's life and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) I. His youth and the gulag The author of The Gulag Archipelago, born a hundred years ago on December in the very early Bolshevik Russia, is a Russian writer and dissident of the Soviet regime. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced civil war, Stalinist gulags, exile and disintegration of the former USSR. It is a writer who through these books presents the context of the cold war as it really was a tug between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny. [...]

[...] As the regime hardened under the Brezhnev era and the secret police seized some of his manuscripts, he gave the order to publish The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, in Paris. This meticulous chronicle of the Gulag, nourished by many secret testimonies of survivors of the camps, of his own experience of his years of Gulag, knows a worldwide repercussion since it very strongly criticizes these camps and the way they were used. The book was written between 1958 and 1967 on sheets of paper buried in friendly gardens, a copy being sent to the West by friends interposed to escape censorship. [...]

[...] He is sentenced to "counterrevolutionary activity"[1], eight years of detention in prison labour camps, the gulag. He has many times been saved in the camps by the poetry, the verses he knew, and those he composed. To hold them back, he helped himself to a rosary made with dumplings. "My necklace, a hundred balls of bread, / This thread that pulls you from all the abysses / On which to chain the links of my worms of misfortune, / Condemned to die, you have preserved them. [...]