by Matthew Little

Created on: November 16, 2008   Last Updated: January 12, 2010

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Proverb: "freedom is in the eye of the beholder".

At Moscow's Donskoi Monastery on Wednesday, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest. He was one of the best writer's Russia has had in the 20th century.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the artillery when he was arrested by counterintelligence, because he sent a letter to a friend criticizing Stalin in 1945. He was a dissident most of his life in the Soviet Union, but he was a Communist in the 1930s when war broke out between the Soviet Union and Germany. Solzhenitsyn and his wife were working as teachers in a Cossack settlement at Morozovsk north of Rostov when Solzhenitsyn volunteered for the Red Army. At that time he fought across Ukraine, Byelorussia, Poland and East Prussia. Solzhenitsyn was a good soldier in the Red Army.

Solzhenitsyn was a young idealist Marxist when he was sent to Siberia to work in a Soviet labour camp. They give him eight years at that time; purges were at their height. Solzhenitsyn almost died of cancer in the labour camp and was not released until Stalin's death on March 3, 1953. Solzhenitsyn wrote his first book on his experience in a Soviet labour camp entitled "A Day in the Life of Lvan Denisovich" [1962] and then Solzhenitsyn published two more books which were "Gulag Archipelago", and "First Circle". Solzhenitsyn had a lot of documentation on the Soviet system, a police state that used terror to control the people. The socialist system used these methods from 1918 to 1956, as shown by research Solzhenitsyn did during his 11 years when he was in labour camps and exile.

Solzhenitsyn was a patriot who loved his country and despised the Soviet regime. He was similar to Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote "Crime and Punishment". Dostoevsky had been sentenced to four years hard labor to Siberia because he joined a revolutionary group. Fyodor was born in 1821 to lower-class parents and had a meagre education and was an outsider. He was persecuted by the authorities in autocrat Russia. Solzhenitsyn was a Conservative. He was silent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. There was a coup by headliners when Boris Yeltsion got in 1994 and reformed the Soviet system changing perestroika to a democrat system with a free market. Solzhenitsyn rejected socialism, but he did not like what he saw when he came back from exile from the west. Solzhenitsyn said when you're in hell you write. He sent a manuscript of the Day in the Life of Lvan Denisovich to a literary magazine Novi Mir the. The book is based on his experiences in labour camps in Siberia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a prophet of his times.

References:

www.telegraph.co.uk

www.todayinliterature.com

en.wikepedia.org

Van Doren, C. 2008. "The Joy of Reading", Crown Publishing Inc.

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