Astounding that he survived for so long: a man of great courage and conviction.

R.I.P.

Its a shame that such a writer, who had an eventful life, sometimes through no fault of his own, should at the end of his life become seriously ill and no doubt painfull death. His son Stepan, was saying that e had a heart attack and a press agency or the Kremlin, was saying that it was a stroke!! I would hazard a guess that it was a heart attack.
He was the same age as my father.


 

There was a wonderful scene at the Whitehouse not long after the Soviets ejected him. Jimmy Carter invited him over to hobnob with Washington's great and good. A lavish dinner was laid on, the power wives were all there in their jewels, the chaps in cummerbunds, and the old Cossack was invited to say a few words after the pudding. They expected him to savage the USSR, flatter their liberal capitalist sensibilities, and generally to grovel for being granted asylum in the free West. Not a bit of it. He LAID into them. A icy silence struck the room as he called America morally bankrupt, said the lowest Russian peasant or factory worker had more culture in his little finger compared to the average 'TV dinner Yank', and that at least Soviet citizens weren't politically naive. No Russian, he said, was stupid enough to believe what he read in 'Pravda' yet Americans lapped up Western media lies as if at their mother's tit. He wasn't invited back.

I remember that alright. What a man!! One could see his point of view very clearly.

I don't think it can have been the White House because he was never invited there and no US President ever saw fit to meet him.

He did however tear into the West pretty ferociously in a famous speech at Harvard which caused more than a flutterng in the dovecotes: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html
 
Having just read it again, it is a very odd speech indeed. It was the attack on the Western way of life that caused the fuss at the time but there's nothing in the way of comfort for Marxists or Socialist Materialists either. He curses both houses equally for abandoning spirituality. I don't see that either side can begin to claim him as 'theirs' at least at this point in his life. Fundamentalist Christianity of some sort seems to be the answer in a 'cosmic fight' against what he identifies as the forces of Evil. 

A towering, courageous and important figure even so. RIP.

After his return to Russia he strongly endorsed a variety of pan-slavicism that won him very few friends, and distanced him from the main body of his supporters who tried to shuffle his outspoken views under the carpet.  He had evidently planned this "triumphant return" for years whilst in exile, and it followed an elaborate plan.  He arrived at Vladivostok (Aeroflot used to fly there from Anchorage, but they don't any longer), and was to take the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow, stopping en-route in all major cities to give rabble-rousing speeches to his faithful.  However, the numbers of faithful got very thin after they read the text he'd declaimed in Vladivostok, and by the time he reached Moscow some weeks later he'd been advised - by his own people - to cancel his speech entirely.  Unfortunately the bitterness this caused simply made his speeches even more ferocious and outlandish.  It was a very sad thing to watch.

His career strangely followed the same course as Dostoevsky's a century before... lauded for early work but then immediately sent to Siberian prison-camps... released and fled to the West... associated with liberals abroad with whom he violently quarreled...  returned to Russia cursing the West and its thinkers...  became obsessed in his final years that only the Russian Orthodox Church could "save" Russia, and a return to an almost-puritanical moral code was needed.

I'm slightly saddened to see him described as a one-man force in exposing KGB wrongdoing in the camps and elsewhere - as this discounts the courage of several other figures who remained in Russia, and particularly:

# Eugenia Ginzburg, who wrote "Into The Whirlwind" (sometimes titled "Journey Into a Whirlwind", but published in Russia under the title "Krutoi Marshrut", "The Harsh Route"). She was imprisoned in the mid-30's for alleged links with Trotsky, and survived both the Lefortovo Political Prison and the notorious Butyrski Jail,  before being sent to Siberia... but en route her destination was switched and she was sent to the harshest camp of all, the notorious Kolyma Gold Fields in the Siberian Arctic.  She survived and was "rehabilitated" in 1955.

# Varlam Shalamov, the St Petersburg poet and intellectual, who spent almost his whole life in the Gulag, in three separate terms in different camps and prisons.  Like Ginzburg his final term was at Kolyma, although they don't seem to have known each other - there were millions of prisoners, of course. "Kolyma Tales" is the title of a collection of his short stories written in the Gulag. (It's been speculated that he wrote Ginzburg "into" one of the stories later, as the nurse at the Magadan Hospital, which is where she had worked.) The detached, poetic literary style marks them out from other "Gulag Literature" as an extraordinary achievement.  Although Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn describe the injustice of the system, it's Shalamov who chronicles its ghastly inhuman horror.

# Vassily Grossman, unlike the others, was never sent to the camps. A journalist before WW2, he was "embedded" with a Red Army division and covered the Battle of Stalingrad - by chance he was with the Russian division which first reached the Treblinka camp.  His attempts to publish an expose of the artificially-generated "Holodomor" famine in Ukraine in the 1930s (which had seen, but been unable to report) led him into conflict with the Kremlin, and he found himself "banned" - free, but unable to publish anything in the USSR.  His books (notably "Life & Fate") document the way in which atrocities committed by the USSR during WW2 were retrospectively rewritten to incriminate Nazis instead.  Although he died in 1964, it took until 1980 for "Life & Fate" to appear abroad - it was smuggled-out on a microfilm, with the pages of Grossman's text photographed by refusenik Nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov.