Alexander Solzhenitsyn: biography and creativity

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. Solzhenitsyn studied brilliantly, but all the philological principle in him was stronger than the mathematical one. In 1939 he entered the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. This year was marked for Alexander Isaevich and another event - the marriage to NA. The lattice. The fateful 1941 came. Solzhenitsyn is eager for the front, but on mobilization gets into the rear battalion. A new round of fate - and he sent to the artillery school in Kostroma, after which Alexander in 1942, finally, gets to the front.

Solzhenitsyn well established himself at the front, not without reason awarded him the Order of the Patriotic War and the Red Star and promoted in rank. Military career of the writer could be quite successful, if not for his "freethinking". In the spring of 1945, Alexander Isayevich was arrested and sentenced to 8 years of forced labor camps. In May 1950, Solzhenitsyn had to change the relatively mild regime of special facilities to the harsh routine of a special camp in Kazakhstan. These were the darkest pages in the camp life of the future Nobel laureate. In addition to everything in 1951, his wife informed Solzhenitsyn about a divorce with him and about his new marriage. A year later he was overtaken by a terrible disease - cancer. Folk remedies, will and thirst for life overcame the disease, and she for a while retreated. At the end of the sentence, Solzhenitsyn was sent into eternal exile in the Kazakh village, where he was admitted to secondary school for lack of teachers.

In 1956 Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court. He leaves the place of exile and is arranged by the teacher in one of the villages of the Vladimir region, where he takes a room with an old single peasant woman, Matryena Zakharova. Her life full of hardships and tragic death formed the basis of the plot of the story "Matrenin Dvor". Soon Solzhenitsyn managed to move to Ryazan and get a job in school. On the loose, the craving for creativity of the future Nobel laureate only increases. He works on the novels "In the First Circle" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The last laconic means expresses the monstrous essence of the camp system, which determined the life of the entire USSR. On the wave of initial success, Solzhenitsyn managed to publish a few more small works in Novy Mir, but the Cancer Corps, accepted by the magazine, never saw the light for many years. And then Solzhenitsyn concentrates on the work on his main work, started back in 1959, the Gulag Archipelago.

In the "Archipelago" Solzhenitsyn Alexander reproduces the history of the creation of numerous camps and the peculiarities of their functioning, narrates about the destinies of people, for one reason or another, and more often - without any reasons that have fallen into the millstone of Soviet "justice", explores all aspects of camp life and morals . This book was created on the basis of stories and letters of the repressed and personal experience of the author.

In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union, the press began to openly persecute him. The persecution of the authorities only strengthens Solzhenitsyn's international authority, and in 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he, like Boris Pasternak, was not allowed to get in Stockholm.

For a while Solzhenitsyn lived in Germany, then in Switzerland, and from 1976 to 1994 - in America. During his years in America, Solzhenitsyn repeatedly appeared in the press, touching topical political problems in the USSR and in the West.

In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland and settled in Moscow, continuing to work intensively. And all these years his irreplaceable assistant to the writer in all his undertakings was his second wife, ND. Svetlova, who was in charge of publishing and organizational affairs.

In recognition of Solzhenitsyn's merits in the struggle for civil liberties and on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the writer was awarded the Order of St. Andrew in 1998, but refused to accept him in the conditions of the unstable political and economic situation in the country.

The last time Solzhenitsyn's great work is a historical culturological study "200 years together". It examines the role and place of Jews in the history of the Russian state. Despite the author's desire for objectivity, this book provoked a lively polemic.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008 from acute heart failure.

"One Day of Ivan Denisovich"

Story. Written in 1959, published by AT Twardowski in the magazine "New World" (1962). Turning to the camp theme, casually mentioned by the then-publicist, Solzhenitsyn first raised this topic to the level of high artistic generalization and such interpretation, which destroyed the ideological illusions of that time. Solzhenitsyn showed that the Stalinist repression is not the tyrant's evil will and not a retreat from socialism, but the essence of the system, which is basically repressive and inhuman. This conclusion follows from the description of the fate of the peasant Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, described in the story of the fate of the camp life. The story is filled with pain for abused human dignity, compassion for innocent victims, respect for those who, like Ivan Denisovich, being behind barbed wire, managed to retain the best human qualities. All this "One day of Ivan Denisovich" made a revolution in the minds of millions of compatriots.

Matrenin yard

Story. Written in 1959, first published in the "New World" in 1963. Author's name - "It is not worth a village without a righteous man." In the center of the narrative is the image of the peasant woman Matryona, whose tragic fate is described against the backdrop of pictures of a dying village. Along with FA Abramov's novels, this work predetermined the course of "village prose".

"The Gulag Archipelago"

Documentary and artistic work. Written in 1958-1967, first published in the West in 1973, in Russia only in 1989. In it, Solzhenitsyn summarized many of the evidences and previously unknown historical facts associated with the political repressions of the Soviet era and unleashed by Stalin "great terror". "The Gulag Archipelago" is a book about executioners and victims, about the crimes of the communist regime, which turned the country into a giant concentration camp. It had a powerful impact on world public opinion and dispelled the illusions about the utopias of socialism and communism, which until the 1970s enjoyed considerable popularity among Western intellectuals.