Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/solzhenitsyn-as-he-saw-himself/

by chesterfield • 8 years ago

110 70 8 years ago

the-tls.co.uk

frereubu3• 8 years ago

Reading The Gulag Archipelago at university changed my life. I'd been reading Dostoyevsky for a bit, which I was enjoying, but The Gulag Archipelago was the book that opened my eyes to the idea that literature could have fierce moral purpose. I also loved the fact it was dripping with deadpan sarcasm and irony. A wonderful response for the powerless to take given the Kafkaesque situations that people found themselves in under Stalinism. I'm in awe of the incredible bravery of samizdat publishing given the horrific consequences that could follow if you were caught.

winchling• 8 years ago

dripping with deadpan sarcasm

It seems that sarcasm became prevalent in Soviet Russia because it's a way of expressing opposition without party members being able to use your words to denounce you.

99052882514569• 8 years ago

If you found the Gulag Archipelago insightful (the word 'enjoyed' seems wrong in this context), I highly recommend The Kolyma Tales[1] by Varlam Shalamov. Shalamov spent 17 years in 'hard labour' camps, in total. His work is more like a historical novel, akin to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", but more raw and visceral.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kolyma_Tales

pmoriarty3• 8 years ago

"Things I Learned in the Gulag", from Kolyma Tales was on HN previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17298645

frereubu3• 8 years ago

Thanks, I'll take a look.

burger_moon• 8 years ago

I've tried several times to read different Dostoyevsky stories but just can't follow them. It's written in too 'complicated' sentences I guess. It doesn't read like modern sentence structure I guess is how I would describe it. I'm just not smart enough to follow along without spending a lot of time rereading sentences trying to understand what is being said. It's like trying to read Shakespeare for me. I wish there was a better way to read it for dumb people I guess haha

frereubu3• 8 years ago

It took me a long time to wrap my head around literature like this. I read nothing but simple sci-fi and fantasy as a teenager, and it wasn't until I got to university that I tried reading "literature". The first one was The Brothers Karamazov, which I picked up off my dad's shelf. I struggled for 150+ pages, until something clicked - I think I'd tuned into the way Dostoyevsky (or, more accurately, the translator) wrote or something like that. Not everyone has to enjoy this stuff - it's not worth beating yourself up if you don't like it - but I'd encourage you to stick with it for quite a while because, at least in my case, the rewards are more than worth it once you've tuned in. Having said that, I tried to read The Brothers Karamazov again recently and found it terribly histrionic, so there are definitely some books that click more at different times in life.

ericdykstra2• 8 years ago

Great profile of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; one of the most important writers of the last century who was prolific up until his death. It's a shame that his last non-fiction work has yet to get a proper English translation even after all these years.

asianthrowaway2• 8 years ago

Well, I heard it's rather... controversial, to say the least.

enriquto4• 8 years ago

He's a writer, not an historian. Thus his non-fiction works do not have to be read like history books, more like journalistic opinion pieces. In that sense, the factual errors on this book are mostly irrelevant, and the work is still very interesting and insightful.

FranzFerdiNaN• 8 years ago

Shame much of what he wrote down was a lie, or at the very least fiction. Which wasn't necessary, because the system was terrible enough. The Gulag Archipelago is useful as a source for life within the system, but cant be taken as truth. His wife is quoted as saying the book was meant as fiction, but the West took it as fact (i'm sure they had no good reason at all to promote the shit out of an anti-Soviet book). Solzhenitsyn also praised Franco and his dictatorship, was fiercely anti-Semitic and would have preferred Hitler winning the war against the Soviets. So yeah, stand-up guy overall. Guess he simply preferred a different dictatorship than the one he to to live in.

Current historical analysis places the gulag system in a different light, with political opponents being a minor part of the population, sentences being much shorter (less than 5 years) and general conditions being better than described in the book. Solzhenitsyn talks about 50 million prisoners with a peak population of 14 million, while current figures are somewhere around 14-18 million prisoners in total, with 2 million peak population at it's height. Still really high, but really, compared to America in this day and age not that shocking.

doombolt2• 8 years ago

When you write "places the gulag system in a different light" I can't read it as anything but genocide denial.

ethelward• 8 years ago

genocide denial

Please don't use powerful words at the wrong place, you are depleting them of their meaning.

A genocide has an actual definition according to the international law, and the Gulag system does not tick any of the boxes.

The Gulag system was a very harsh penal colony system (although on a far larger scale that what was done before), in continuation of the ones already existing during the tsarist times – and with death rates comparable to what could be found i.e. in the Cayenne penal colony.

It was neither aimed at killing convicts (with mortality rates under 10%, it would have done an awful job at it), nor was it targeting a peculiar ethnic group.

kryogen1c• 8 years ago

Yeah I agree. This is tantamount to Holocaust denial, and to go on and compare the gulags to the American penal system really highlights the degree of nonsense.

asianthrowaway2• 8 years ago

I always wondered why Franco has such a bad rep. I'm not really knowledgeable about the Spanish civil war but it seems he prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country, which is a good thing in my book.

I mean no doubt he was a brutal dictator but in the grand scheme of things he was by far the lesser of two evils.

Edit: also I think your comparison of the American prison system and the gulag to be rather ridiculous. Afaik, american prisoners aren't worked to death in arctic conditions.

doombolt2• 8 years ago

prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country,

Or maybe it would be a flop and something closer to present euro-socialism which Spain ended up implementing anyway.

One should avoid being a brutal dictator since you never know at which rate you exchange real blood to imaginary one.

jacobush• 8 years ago

It was not all that clear at the time that communism would become as bad as it turned out almost everywhere it was tried.

Edit: downvoted, but I think this is objectively true. The worst atrocities hadn't happen yet in the 1930's. Hindsight is 20 20. A lot of people drew on older ideals from the French revolution which we still celebrate today, not the least in the US. (Do you really think the blood of tyrants can be spillt without collateral damage?)

matt4077• 8 years ago

If you wonder about Franco's bad rep, why don't you actually check it out, instead of challenging people to prove the evil of fascist to you from first principle, and claiming their virtue if they don't.

What is your professed naïveté supposed to accomplish, except to serve as propaganda for a universally abhorred fascist while simultaneously retaining your option to claim ignorance when challenged?

arethuza4• 8 years ago

I read The Gulag Archipelago then later I read Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum and while Solzhenitsyn's work shocked me the sheer scale of things described by Applebaum (and how utterly futile most of it was) really left a deep impression on me.

nec4b7• 8 years ago

Five years of freezing in siberian winter, starving and doing grueling manual labor makes the gulag experience not so terrible for you?

andrepd7• 8 years ago

I like how all your posts consist of "he was in a gulag therefore you can't call him out or criticise him".

nec4b7• 8 years ago

The sad thing is that while the soviet union has lost the old war economically, it's ideas have been internalized by a great deal of western "intelligentsia" voluntary with open hearths, instead listening to people like Solzhenitsyn.

CapacitorSet• 8 years ago

Solzhenitsyn is an anti-semite, and blames atheism for the existence of the Soviet Union and the problems in the modern world in general.

It is a great thing that he isn't being listened to - and yet, he is receiving more attention than he's worth.

nec4b7• 8 years ago

Yep, people surviving gulags (where btw. lot of jewish people died as well), need to be called names, because they them selves were not saints and said stupid things sometimes.

varjag5• 8 years ago

Yes. He was hardcore Russian/Orthodox exceptionalist. A staunch Putin's supporter in his later years. He despised the Western values and was anti-Soviet since it was contrary to his nationalist ideals.

One of the most well known Soviet dissident works, Moscow 2042 by Voinovich, has a key character who is a spot-on satirical depiction of Solzhenitsyn.

pmoriarty3• 8 years ago

Is there any way to read this that doesn't require javascript?

otras• 8 years ago

I highly recommend the article A Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn[0] to learn more about his life in Vermont. His relationship to the town is very interesting and particularly interesting to me as I used to live near Cavendish.

[0] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/statement/tiny-vi...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself

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