Aleksandr solzhenitsyn quotes

Why was aleksandr solzhenitsyn imprisoned
Aleksandr solzhenitsyn died
Aleksandr solzhenitsyn spouse

•

Biography

Winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia. He studied mathematics at Rostov University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.

During World War II, he served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Soviet Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was thrice decorated for personal heroism. In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. The experience of the camps provided him with raw material for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he was permitted to publish in 1962. It would remain his only major work to appear in his motherland until 1990.

Solzhenitsyn’s exile was cut short by Khrushchev’s reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to central Russia in 1956. He taught mathematics, astronomy and physics at a high school while continuing to write. In the early 19

•

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Biography

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s father, Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, was a farmer and intellectual who worked his way to the University of Moscow and was the first in his family to go to school. He studied literature but left school to join the army and spent three years at the German front in World War I. In August of 1917, he married Taissia Shcherbak. Born into a wealthy landowning family, Taissia was educated in exclusive schools and then attended the Golitsyn Academy of Agriculture in Moscow, where she met Isaaki Solzhenitsyn. They were married less than a year when he died in a hunting accident. Six months later, on December 11, 1918, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk.

In 1924, after several years of increasingly hostile Bolshevik disturbances in Kislovodsk, Taissia and the young Solzhenitsyn moved to Rostov-on-Don. His mother worked as a stenographer and they lived in part of a reconstructed stable without adequate heat and little money for food. After he graduated high school in 1936, Solzhenitsyn attended Rostov University on a Stalin Schol

•

Autobiography

Mama knew French and English well, and had also studied shorthand and typing, but agencies that paid well never hired her, because of her social origin.

My only memory of my father is from photographs and the stories told by my mother and other people who knew him. While a student at the university he volunteered for the army, and he served in the Grenadier Artillery Brigade. Once when the battery was set afire, he saved some munitions boxes himself.

The three officer’s decorations that he left from World War I —which in my childhood were considered the mark of a dangerous criminal—were buried by my mother and me out of fear of a search. When the whole front was collapsing, my father’s battery remained on the front lines until the Treaty of Brest. My mother and father were married at the front by a brigade priest.

Papa returned home in the spring of 1918, and soon thereafter died as a result of an accident and poor medical care. His grave in Georgievsk was leveled by a tractor in the construction of a stadium.

Therefore I enrolled in the mathemati