Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, 1918-2008, Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of the 20th cent., b. Kislovodsk.

Solzhenitsyn grew up in Rostov-na-Donu, where he studied physics and mathematics at Rostov State Univ. During World War II he served in the Red Army, rising to the rank of artillery captain, and was decorated for bravery. In 1945, while still serving on the German front, he was arrested for mildly criticizing Stalin in letters to a friend. In the Moscow prisons he was for the first time confronted with the tragic fates of political prisoners. Sentenced to eight years in labor camps, he worked as a menial laborer and was stricken with cancer (from which he later recovered).

After completing (1953) his prison sentence, he was exiled to the Kazakh SSR (now Kazakhstan). Stalin died in 1953 and Solzhenitsyn's citizenship was restored in 1956. He moved to the Russian city of Ryazan, S of Moscow, where he taught in a local high school and wrote. His early fiction describes the grimness of life in the vast Soviet labor-camp system. His short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was permitted publication in 1962 through the personal intervention of Nikita Khrushchev, in an effort to further encourage anti-Stalinist feeling and to promote his own liberalizing reforms. The book was hailed as a brilliant exposé of Stalinist methods, and it placed the author in the foremost ranks of Soviet writers. Three more short novels were published in 1963. However, with Khrushchev's removal from office (1964), Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were confiscated, his succeeding works were banned, and he was continually censured by the Soviet press and denounced as a traitor.

With subsequent novels—The First Circle (1968), detailing the lives of scientists forced to work in a Stalinist research center, and Cancer Ward (1968), concerning the complex social microcosm within a government hospital—censorship tightened, and Solzhenitsyn was increasingly regarded as a dangerous and hostile critic of Soviet society. His books found publication and an enormous audience abroad, where he was hailed as a successor to Russia's 19th-century literary giants. In the USSR his works were circulated in samizdat [self-publishing, underground] editions. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and prohibited from living in Moscow. His cause was championed by prominent writers and scholars worldwide and his treatment became one of the most notorious cases of intellectual persecution and literary censorship of the cold-war period.

In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but government pressure, specifically the threat of not being allowed to return from Stockholm, compelled him to decline the prize. His next novel, August 1914 (1971, rev. ed 1983, tr. 1972, 1989), published abroad, is a compelling exposition of the internal strife in Russia leading to the Revolution of 1917. It and its sequels, October 1916 (1984, tr. 1999 as November 1916), March 1917 (1986), and April 1917 (1991), form the monumental four-volume series of historical novels that describe the Russian Revolution and are collectively titled The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn considered it his major work.

In 1973, fearing that he might soon be imprisoned again, Solzhenitsyn authorized foreign publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a vast work he had started in 1963 and completed in 1968 documenting, with personal interviews and reminiscences, the operation of the oppressive Soviet labor-camp system (see Gulag) from 1918 to 1956. Widely acclaimed as his masterpiece, it is a powerful and searing indictment of the Soviet regime. In Feb., 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, formally accused of treason, stripped of his citizenship, and forcibly deported to the West. In exile he personally accepted his Nobel Prize in Stockholm (1974).

Solzhenitsyn ultimately settled in the United States, living in rural Cavendish, Vermont. He rarely appeared in public, but when he did speak out he tended to condemn the moral weakness and materialism he found in the United States. In 1980 two nonfiction works were published, The Oak and the Calf, a memoir, and The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America. The last three volumes of The Red Wheel were also completed during his years in Vermont. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev restored the writer's citizenship and the following year treason charges were dropped, laying the groundwork for Solzhenitsyn's 1994 return to his homeland. After touring the country, he denounced the new Russia and what he saw as its spiritual decline, and he called for a return to a paternalistic, autocratic government rooted in the Orthodox Church and Russian nationalism, a view that many deemed anachronistic and antithetical to the aspirations of the modern nation. In later years he publicly supported President Putin, whom he hailed for restoring Russian greatness, while also accusing Western nations of trying to encircle Russia.

Solzhenitsyn's works also include a number of short stories, a play, film scripts, and numerous essays. Some have criticized his writing as old-fashioned and his world view as rigid, reactionary, harsh, authoritarian, overly moralistic, and irrelevant to the contemporary world. However, he remains widely read (during his lifetime more than 30 million of his books were sold and his works were translated into more than 40 languages). Moreover, he continues to be profoundly respected not only as a fearless novelist who convincingly described techniques of terror and the resulting moral debasement in the USSR, but also as a leader of a small but vociferous group of intellectual dissidents who successfully endeavored to expose the nature of the Soviet system.

(born Dec. 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia—died Aug. 3, 2008, Troitse-Lykovo, near Moscow) Russian novelist and historian. He fought in World War II but was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Joseph Stalin. He spent eight years in prisons and labour camps and three more in enforced exile. With One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), based on his labour-camp experiences, he emerged as an eloquent opponent of government repression. He was forced to publish later works abroad, including The First Circle (1968), Cancer Ward (1968), and August 1914 (1971). In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago (1973), one of the greatest works in Russian prose, resulted in his being charged with treason. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he moved to the U.S., at the time enjoying worldwide fame. In the late 1980s glasnost brought renewed access to his work in Russia but also a loss of interest in it and in the prophetic role he claimed for himself in Russian history. In 1994 Solzhenitsyn ended his exile and returned to Russia. From 1998 to 2003 he published installments of his autobiography, “The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones,” and in 2007 he was awarded Russia's prestigious State Prize.

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Nikolai Getman (Николай Гетман, Микола Ґетьман), an artist, was born in 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and died at his home in Orel, Russia, in August 2004. He was a prisoner from 1946 to 1953 in forced labor camps in Siberia and Kolyma, where he survived as a result of his ability to sketch for the propaganda requirements of the authorities. He is remembered as one of few artists who has recorded the life of prisoners in the Gulag in the form of paintings (see also drawings by Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya).

Early life

Getman had a difficult childhood in Ukraine, often close to starvation, but from the very beginning was able to develop his natural artistic talents. After graduating from technical college in 1937, he attended the Kharkiv Art College in order to become a professional artist. Three years later he was called up to join the Red Army, where he served until the end of World War II. Shortly after his return, he was arrested for participating in anti-Soviet propaganda as a result of a caricature of Stalin one of his friends had drawn on a cigarette box. He was convicted in January 1946 and sent to Gulag prison camps in Siberia.

The Gulag legacy

During the eight years Getman spent at Taishetlag (Siberia) and Svitlag (Kolyma), he started to develop his plan to record the horrors of the camp conditions in the form of paintings. While he could not paint openly in the camps, he took careful note of all that transpired. Even when he started to paint after his release in 1953, he still had to do so in secret as he would otherwise have been convicted once again, perhaps even sentenced to death. In his own words: "I undertook the task because I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not be forgotten.

The Jamestown Foundation provides access to all 50 of Getman's paintings together with explanations of their significance. Their impact is especially effective in providing visual representations of the conduct of the camps, the harsh working conditions, the severe climate and the fate of the prisoners themselves.

The Gulag paintings were not shown until 1993 at a private exhibition in the gallery of the Russian Artists' Union in Orel. In 1995, there was a special ceremony in the Turgenev Theatre in Orel where a Getman exhibition entitled "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" was opened in the presence of the artist and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago.

In June 1997, with the support of the Jamestown Foundation and Getman's own wish to bring his paintings to the West, the private exhibition "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" was displayed at the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C.

Other artistic activities

In 1953, after his release, Getman worked as an artist in the House of Culture in Yagodnoe in Magadan Oblast. In 1956, he took part in an exhibition of the works of artists from Siberia and the Kolyma region and became a candidate for the USSR Union of Artists in 1957. In April 1963, he took part in the Second Congress of the USSR Artists' Union in Moscow, and in 1964 became a member of the USSR Artists' Union. He helped organize the Magadan Artists' Union and became director of the Magadan section of the Arts Foundation of the RSFSR from 1963 to 1966. In 1976, he moved from Magadan to Orel, where he had a studio in the local branch of the Russian Artists' Union. During this period he was also required to paint a number of portraits of political figures.

He participated in several art exhibitions across the Soviet Union as well as in Germany, Bulgaria, Finland and The Netherlands.

The artist's plea

Getman is quite clear about his goal: "Some may say that the Gulag is a forgotten part of history and that we do not need to be reminded. But I have witnessed monstrous crimes. It is not too late to talk about them and reveal them. It is essential to do so. Some have expressed fear on seeing some of my paintings that I might end up in Kolyma again—this time for good. But the people must be reminded...of one of the harshest acts of political repression in the Soviet Union. My paintings may help achieve this.

External links

• From the Artist by A full account of Getman's life in his words from the Form and Substance site. Retrieved 13 February 2007.
• Gulag Art: Nikolai Getman's unique portraits of Soviet oppression by Robert Conquest, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2004.

Bibliography

• Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505580-2; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0-19-507132-8
• Getman, Nikolai: The Gulag Collection: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System, The Jamestown Foundation, 2001, 131 p., ISBN 0967500915
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, 660 pp., ISBN 0-06-080332-0.

See also

• Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya

Footnotes