Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union. Prior to the nineteenth century, the seeds of the Russian literary tradition were sown by the poets, playwrights and writers as Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Sumarokov, Vasily Trediakovsky, Nikolay Karamzin and Ivan Krylov.

From the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age, beginning with the poet Alexander Pushkin and culminating in two of the greatest novelists in world literature, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A second wave followed, led by prosaists Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. In the Twentieth Century leading figures of Russian literature included internationally recognised poets such as Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Anna Achmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and prose writers Ivan Bunin, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, Vassily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Early history

Old Russian literature consists of several masterpieces written in the Old Russian language (not to be confused with the contemporaneous Church Slavonic). Anonymous works of this nature include ''The Tale of Igor's Campaign'' and ''Praying of Daniel the Immured''. The so-called "lives of the saints" (, ''zhitiya svyatykh'') formed a popular genre of the Old Russian literature. ''Life of Alexander Nevsky'' offers a well-known example. Other Russian literary monuments include ''Zadonschina'', ''Physiologist'', ''Synopsis'' and ''A Journey Beyond the Three Seas''. Bylinas – oral folk epics – fused Christian and pagan traditions. Medieval Russian literature had an overwhelmingly religious character and used an adapted form of the Church Slavonic language with many South Slavic elements. The first work in colloquial Russian, the autobiography of the archpriest Avvakum, emerged only in the mid-17th century.

Petrine era

The modernization of Russia, commonly associated with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, coincided with a reform of the Russian alphabet and increased tolerance of the idea of employing the popular language for general literary purposes. Authors like Antiochus Kantemir, Vasily Trediakovsky, and Mikhail Lomonosov in the earlier 18th century paved the way for poets like Gavrila Derzhavin, playwrights like Alexander Sumarokov and Denis Fonvizin, and prose writers like Alexander Radishchev and Nikolay Karamzin; the latter is often credited with creation of the modern Russian literary language.

Golden Age

The 19th century is traditionally referred to as the "Golden Era" of Russian literature. Romanticism permitted a flowering of especially poetic talent: the names of Vasily Zhukovsky and later that of his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Pushkin is credited with both crystallizing the literary Russian language and introducing a new level of artistry to Russian literature. His best-known work is a novel in verse, ''Eugene Onegin''. An entire new generation of poets including Mikhail Lermontov, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev, and Afanasy Fet followed in Pushkin's steps.

Prose was flourishing as well. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Nikolai Leskov, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, all mastering both short stories and novels, and novelist Ivan Goncharov. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky soon became internationally renowned to the point that many scholars such as F.R. Leavis have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in writing short stories and became perhaps the leading dramatist internationally of his period.

Other important nineteenth-century developments included Ivan Krylov the fabulist; non-fiction writers such as Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen; playwrights such as Aleksandr Griboyedov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Kozma Prutkov (a collective pen name) the satirist.

Suicide

Nineteenth century Russian literature perpetuated disparate ideas of suicide; it became another facet of culture and society in which men and women were regarded and treated differently. A woman could not commit the noble, heroic suicide that a man could; she would not be regarded highly or as a martyr, but as a simple human who, overcome with feelings of love gone unfulfilled and having no one to protect her from being victimized by society, surrendered herself. Many of the 19th century Russian heroines were victims of suicide as well as victims of the lifestyle of St. Petersburg, which was long argued to have imported the very idea of and justifications for suicide into Russia. St. Petersburg, which was built as a Western rather than a Russian city was long accused by supporters of traditional Russian lifestyles as importing Western ideas—the ideas of achieving nobility, committing suicide and, the synthesis of these two ideas, the nobility of suicide being among them. Novels set in Moscow in particular, such as ''Anna Karenina'', and ''Bednaia Liza'' (Poor Liza), follow a trend of female suicides which suggest a weakness in character which exists only because they are women; they are said by readers to be driven by their emotions into situations from which suicide seems to be the only escape. These instances of self-murder have no deeper meaning than that and, in the case of ''Bednaia Liza,'' the setting of Moscow serves only to provide a familiarity which will draw the reader to it, and away from Western novels.

Contrastingly, many novels set in St. Petersburg viewed suicide primarily through the lens of a male protagonist (as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) as opposed to the females who held the spotlight in the aforementioned titles. Beyond that, instead of the few females who commit suicide in these Petersburg texts being propelled to such lengths by a love so powerful and inescapable that it consumed them, financial hardships and moral degradation which they faced in the Imperial Capital contaminated or destroyed their femininity; related to this, prostitution became markedly more prominent in popular literature in the 19th century.

Another new aspect of literary suicides introduced in the Petersburg texts is that authors have shifted their gazes from individuals and their plot-driving actions to presentations of broad political ideologies, which are common to Greek and Roman heroes—this step was taken in order to establish a connection between Russian male protagonists who take their own lives and Classic tragic heroes, whereas the women of the literature remained as microcosms for the stereotyped idea of the female condition. The idea of suicide as a mode of protecting one’s right to self-sovereignty was seen as legitimate within the sphere of St. Petersburg, a secular and “Godless…” capital. Unlike Classic tragic heroes, the deaths of male protagonists, such as in Nikolai Gogol’s ''Nevskii Prospekt'' and Dmitry Grigorovich’s ''Svistul’kin'', did not bring about great celebrations in their honor, or even faint remembrances amongst their comrades. In fact, both protagonists die lonely deaths, suffering quietly and alone in their final hours. Until the Russian revolution in 1917, such themes remained prominent in literature.

Silver Age

The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Well-known poets of the period include: Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Mikhail Kuzmin, Igor Severyanin, Sasha Chorny, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maximilian Voloshin, Innokenty Annensky, Zinaida Gippius. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak.

While the Silver Age is considered to be the development of the 19th century Russian literature tradition, some avant-garde poets tried to overturn it: Velimir Khlebnikov, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Though the Silver Age is famous mostly for its poetry, it produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fedor Sologub, Aleksey Remizov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely, though most of them wrote poetry as well as prose.

XX Century: Soviet and "White émigré" literature

The first years of the Soviet regime were marked by the proliferation of avant-garde literature groups. One of the most important was the Oberiu movement that included Nikolay Zabolotsky, Alexander Vvedensky, Konstantin Vaginov and the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. Other famous authors experimenting with language were novelists Andrei Platonov and Yuri Olesha and short story writers Isaak Babel and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

In the 1930s Socialist realism became the officially approved style. Several acclaimed Soviet novelists of the time were Maxim Gorky, Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy; and poets Konstantin Simonov and Aleksandr Tvardovsky are being read in Russia to this day. Other Soviet celebrities, such as Alexander Serafimovich, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Alexander Fadeyev, Fyodor Gladkov or Demyan Bedny have never been published by mainstream publishers after 1989.

Few of the pre-World War II Soviet writers could be published without strictly following the Socialist realism guidelines. A notable exception were satyrics Ilf and Petrov, with their picaresque novels about a charismatic con artist Ostap Bender. Writers like those of Serapion Brothers group, who insisted on the right of an author to write independently of political ideology, were forced by authorities to reject their views and accept Socialist realism principles. Some 1930's writers, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, and Nobel-prize winning Boris Pasternak with his novel ''Doctor Zhivago'' continued the classical tradition of Russian literature with little or no hope of being published. Their major works would not be published until the Khrushchev Thaw and Pasternak was forced to refuse his Nobel prize.

Meanwhile, ''émigré'' writers, such as poets Vyacheslav Ivanov, Georgy Ivanov and Vladislav Khodasevich; novelists such as Gaito Gazdanov, Mark Aldanov and Vladimir Nabokov and short story Nobel Prize winning writer Ivan Bunin, continued to write in exile.

The Khrushchev Thaw brought some fresh wind to the literature. Poetry became a mass cultural phenomenon: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky and Bella Akhmadulina read their poems in stadiums and attracted huge crowds.

Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, like short story writer Varlam Shalamov and Nobel Prize winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the gulag camps, or Vasily Grossman, with his description of World War II events countering the Soviet official historiography. They were dubbed "dissidents" and could not publish their major works until the 1960s.

But the thaw did not last long. In the 1970s, some of the most prominent authors were not only banned from publishing, but were also prosecuted for their Anti-Soviet sentiments or parasitism. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country. Others, such as Nobel prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky, novelists Vasily Aksyonov, Eduard Limonov and Sasha Sokolov, and short story writer Sergei Dovlatov, had to emigrate to the US, while Venedikt Yerofeyev and Oleg Grigoriev "emigrated" to alcoholism. Their books were not published officially until perestroika, although fans continued to reprint them manually in a manner called "samizdat" (self-publishing).

In the 1970s there appeared a relatively independent Village Prose, whose most prominent representatives were Viktor Astafyev and Valentin Rasputin. Detective fiction and spy fiction was also popular, thanks to authors like brothers Arkady and Georgy Vayner and Yulian Semyonov.

The Soviet Union produced an especially large amount of Science fiction literature, inspired by the country's space pioneering. Early science fiction authors, such as Alexander Belyayev, Grigory Adamov, Vladimir Obruchev, Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Alexander Kazantsev, stack to hard science fiction, being influenced by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Since the thaw in the 1960s Soviet science fiction began to form its own style. Philosophy, ethics, utopian and dystopian ideas became its core, and Social science fiction was the most popular subgenre. Books of brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and Kir Bulychev, among others, are reminiscent of social problems and often include satire on contemporary Soviet society. Ivan Yefremov, on the contrary, arose to fame with his utopian views on future as well as on Ancient Greece in his historical novels. Strugatskies are also credited for the Soviet's first science fantasy, the Monday Begins on Saturday trilogy.

Space opera subgenre was less developed, since both state censors and "serious" writers watched it unfavorably. Nevertheless, there were moderately successful attempts to adapt space westerns to Soviet soil. The first was Alexander Kolpakov with "Griada", after came Sergey Snegov with "Men Like Gods", among others. Bulychov, along with his adult books, created children's space adventure series about Alisa Seleznyova, a teenage girl from the future.

Post-Soviet era

End of the 20th century has proven a difficult period for Russian literature, with relatively few distinct voices. Among the most discussed authors of this period were Victor Pelevin, who gained popularity with first short stories and then novels, novelist and playwright Vladimir Sorokin, and the poet Dmitry Prigov.

A relatively new trend in Russian literature is that female short story writers Tatyana Tolstaya or Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, and novelists Lyudmila Ulitskaya or Dina Rubina have come into prominence.

Detective stories and thrillers have proven a very successful genre of new Russian literature: in the 90s serial detective novels by Alexandra Marinina, Polina Dashkova and Darya Dontsova were published in millions of copies. In the next decade a more highbrow author Boris Akunin with his series about the 19th century sleuth Erast Fandorin became widely popular.

Fantasy and Science fiction literature is still among best-selling with authors like Sergey Lukyanenko, Nick Perumov and Maria Semenova. A good share of modern Russian science fiction is produced in Ukraine, especially in Kharkiv, home to H. L. Oldie, Alexander Zorich, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Yuri Nikitin and Andrey Valentinov. Significant contribution to Russian horror literature has been done by another Ukrainian author Andrey Dashkov.

The tradition of the classic Russian novel continues with such authors as Mikhail Shishkin and Vasily Aksyonov.

The leading poets of the young generation are arguably Dmitry Vodennikov and Andrey Rodionov, both famous not only for their verses, but also for their ability to artistically recite them.

Trent Johnson was a leading critic of Russian literature during this time.

External influences

British romantic poetry

Robert Burns became a ‘people’s poet’ in Russia. In Imperial times the Russian aristocracy were so out of touch with the peasantry that Burns, translated into Russian, became a symbol for the ordinary Russian people. In Soviet Russia Burns was elevated as the archetypical poet of the people – not least since the Soviet regime slaughtered and silenced its own poets. A new translation of Burns, begun in 1924 by Samuil Marshak, proved enormously popular selling over 600,000 copies. In 1956, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative stamp. The poetry of Burns is taught in Russian schools alongside their own national poets. Burns was a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the French Revolution. Whether Burns would have recognised the same principles at work in the Soviet State at its most repressive is moot. This didn’t stop the Communists from claiming Burns as one of their own and incorporating his work into their state propaganda. The post communist years of rampant capitalism in Russia have not tarnished Burns' reputation.

Lord Byron was a major influence on almost all Russian poets of the Golden Era, including Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Delvig and, especially, Lermontov.

French Literature

Writers such as Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac were widely influential.

Abroad

Russian literature is not only written by Russians. In the Soviet times such popular writers as Belarusian Vasil Bykaŭ, Kyrgyz Chinghiz Aitmatov and Abkhaz Fazil Iskander wrote some of their books in Russian. Some renowned contemporary authors writing in Russian have been born and live in Ukraine (Andriy Kurkov, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko) or Baltic States (Garros and Evdokimov).

A number of prominent Russian authors such as novelists Mikhail Shishkin, Rubén Gallego, Svetlana Martynchik and Dina Rubina, poets Alexei Tsvetkov and Bakhyt Kenjeev, though born in USSR, live and work in West Europe, North America or Israel.

Themes in Russian books

Suffering, often as a means of redemption, is a recurrent theme in Russian literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in particular is noted for exploring suffering in works such as ''Notes from Underground'' and ''Crime and Punishment''. Christianity and Christian symbolism are also important themes, notably in the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. In the 20th century, suffering as a mechanism of evil was explored by authors such as Solzhenitsyn in ''The Gulag Archipelago''. A leading Russian literary critic of the 20th century Viktor Shklovsky, in his book, ''Zoo, or Letters Not About Love'', wrote, "Russian literature has a bad tradition. Russian literature is devoted to the description of unsuccessful love affairs."

Russian Nobel Prize in Literature winners

Ivan Bunin

Boris Pasternak

Mikhail Sholokhov

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Joseph Brodsky

See also

List of Russian language poets

List of Russian language novelists

List of Russian language playwrights

Russian formalism

Pushkin House

List of Russian language writers

Skazka

Russian philosophy

Russian science fiction and fantasy

External links

Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers

Maxim Moshkov's E-library of Russian literature (in Russian)

Contemporary Russian Poets Database (in English)

Contemporary Russian Poets in English translation

La Nuova Europa: international cultural journal about Russia and East of Europe

Information and Critique on Russian Literature

Russian Classics Bulletin by Erik Lindgren (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky)

History of Russian literature Brief summary

Russian Liteary Resources by the Slavic Reference Service

Search Russian Books (in Russian)

Philology in Runet. A special search through the sites devoted to the Old Russian literature.

Публичная электронная библиотека Е.Пескина

References

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Coordinates	52°05′36″N5°7′10″N
name	Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
birth date	June 06, 1799
birth place	Moscow, Russian Empire
death date	February 10, 1837
death place	Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
occupation	Poet, novelist, playwright
influences	Nikolai Karamzin, Denis Fonvizin, Lord Byron, Konstantin Batyushkov, Vasily Zhukovsky, André Chénier, Évariste de Parny
influenced	Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Lermontov, Maxim Gorky, Henry James, Alexander Blok, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, Stanislavski, Ğabdulla Tuqay
signature	Pushkin Signature.svg }}

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (, ) ( – ) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers. He also wrote historical fiction. His ''The Captain's Daughter'' provides insight into Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great.

Born in Moscow, Russia, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo. Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals; in the early 1820s he clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. While under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous play, the drama ''Boris Godunov'', but could not publish it until years later. His novel in verse, ''Eugene Onegin'', was published serially from 1825 to 1832. Due to his political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. In 1937, the town of Tsarskoe Selo was renamed Pushkin in his honour.

Life and career

Pushkin's father Sergei Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1848) descended from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility which traced its ancestry back to the 12th century. Pushkin's mother Nadezhda (Nadja) Ossipovna Gannibal (1775–1836) descended through her paternal grandmother from German, Scandinavian nobility. She was the daughter of Ossip Abramovich Gannibal (1744–1807) and his wife Maria Aleksejevna Pushkina (1745–1818). Ossip Abramovich Gannibal's father, Pushkin's great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), a black page raised by Peter the Great. The only known fact was that he himself wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter, that he was from the town of "Lagon." Russian biographers concluded from the beginning that Lagon was in Ethiopia, a country with Christian associations. Vladimir Nabokov, researching ''Eugene Onegin'', cast serious doubt on the Ethiopian angle. Dieudonné Gnammankou outlined the strong case in 1995 that "Lagon" was a town located on the southern side of Lake Chad, now located in northern Cameroon. There is no conclusive evidence. After education in France as a military engineer, Abram Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually General-en-Chef for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.

Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen. By the time he finished as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo near Saint Petersburg, the Russian literary scene recognized his talent widely. After finishing school, Pushkin installed himself in the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, Saint Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, ''Ruslan and Lyudmila'', amidst much controversy about its subject and style.

Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital (1820). He went to the Caucasus and to the Crimea, then to Kamenka and Chişinău, where he became a Freemason. Here he joined the Filiki Eteria, a secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Ottoman rule over Greece and establish an independent Greek state. He was inspired by the Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke out he kept a diary with the events of the great national uprising. He stayed in Chişinău until 1823 and wrote there two Romantic poems which brought him wide acclaim, ''The Captive of the Caucasus'' and ''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray''. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he again clashed with the government, which sent him into exile at his mother's rural estate in Mikhailovskoe (near Pskov) from 1824 to 1826. However, some of the authorities allowed him to visit Tsar Nicholas I to petition for his release, which he obtained. But some of the insurgents in the Decembrist Uprising (1825) in Saint Petersburg had kept some of his early political poems amongst their papers, and soon Pushkin found himself under the strict control of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will. He had written what became his most famous play, the drama ''Boris Godunov'', while at his mother's estate but could not gain permission to publish it until five years later. The drama's original, uncensored version would not receive a premiere until 2007.

In the year 1831, during the days of Pushkin's growing literary influence, he met one of Russia's other greatest early writers, Nikolai Gogol. After reading Gogol's 1831–2 volume of short stories ''Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka'', Pushkin would support him critically and later in 1836 after starting his magazine, ''The Contemporary'', would feature some of Gogol's most famous short stories. Later, Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, became regulars of court society. When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet became enraged: he felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him. In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, his brother in-law Georges d'Anthès, to a duel which left both men injured, Pushkin mortally. He died two days later. His last home is a museum now.

The government feared a political demonstration at his funeral, which it moved to a smaller location and made open only to close relatives and friends. His body was spirited away secretly at midnight and buried on his mother's estate.

Pushkin descendants

Pushkin had four children from his marriage to Natalya: Maria (b. 1832, touted as a prototype of Anna Karenina), Alexander (b. 1833), Grigory (b. 1835), and Natalya (b. 1836) the last of whom married, morganatically, into the royal house of Nassau to Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau and became the Countess of Merenberg. Of Pushkin's children only the lines of Alexander and Natalia continue. Natalia married Prince Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau, and their grand-daughter, Nadejda, married into the British royal family. The descendants of the poet now live around the globe: in England, Germany and Belgium. About fifty of them live in Russia, including Tatiana Lucas, whose great-grandmother (grand-daughter of Pushkin) was married to the nephew of Nikolai Gogol. Ms. Lucas currently lives in Klin.

Literary legacy

Critics consider many of his works masterpieces, such as the poem ''The Bronze Horseman'' and the drama ''The Stone Guest'', a tale of the fall of Don Juan. His poetic short drama "Mozart and Salieri" was the inspiration for Peter Shaffer's ''Amadeus''. Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel ''Eugene Onegin'', which he wrote over the course of his life and which, starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters but varies widely in tone and focus. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Because of this difficulty in translation, Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers. Even so, Pushkin has profoundly influenced western writers like Henry James.

Pushkin's works also provided fertile ground for Russian composers. Glinka's ''Ruslan and Lyudmila'' is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera, and a landmark in the tradition of Russian music. Tchaikovsky's operas ''Eugene Onegin'' (1879) and ''The Queen of Spades'' (1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name, while Mussorgsky's monumental ''Boris Godunov'' (two versions, 1868-9 and 1871-2) ranks as one of the very finest and most original of Russian operas. Other Russian operas based on Pushkin include Dargomyzhsky's ''Rusalka'' and ''The Stone Guest''; Rimsky-Korsakov's ''Mozart and Salieri'', ''Tale of Tsar Saltan'', and ''The Golden Cockerel''; Cui's ''Prisoner of the Caucasus'', ''Feast in Time of Plague'', and ''The Captain's Daughter''; Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa; Rachmaninov's one-act operas ''Aleko'' (based on The Gypsies) and ''The Miserly Knight''; Stravinsky's Mavra, and Nápravník's ''Dubrovsky''. This is not to mention ballets and cantatas, as well as innumerable songs set to Pushkin's verse. Suppé, Leoncavallo and Malipiero, among non-Russian composers, have based operas on his works.

Romanticism

Although Pushkin is considered the central representative of The Age of Romanticism in Russian literature, he can't be labelled unequivocally as a Romantic: Russian critics have traditionally argued that his works represent a path from neo-Classicism through Romanticism to Realism, while an alternative assessment suggests that "he had an ability to entertain contrarities which may seem Romantic in origin, but is ultimately subversive of all fixed points of view, all single outlooks, including the Romantic" and that "he is simultaneously Romantic and not Romantic".

Influence on the Russian language

Alexander Pushkin is usually credited with developing Russian literature. Not only is he seen as having originated the highly nuanced level of language which characterizes Russian literature after him, but he is also credited with substantially augmenting the Russian lexicon. Where he found gaps in the Russian vocabulary, he devised calques. His rich vocabulary and highly sensitive style are the foundation for modern Russian literature. His talent set up new records for development of the Russian language and culture. He became the father of Russian literature in the 19th century, marking the highest achievements of 18th century and the beginning of literary process of the 19th century. Alexander Pushkin introduced Russia to all the European literary genres as well as a great number of West European writers. He brought natural speech and foreign influences to create modern poetic Russian. Though his life was brief, he left examples of nearly every literary genre of his day: lyric poetry, narrative poetry, the novel, the short story, the drama, the critical essay, and even the personal letter. Pushkin's work as a journalist marked the birth of the Russian magazine culture, including him devising and contributing heavily to one of the most influential literary magazines of the 19th century, the Sovremennik (The Contemporary, or Современник). From him derive the folk tales and genre pieces of other authors: Esenin, Leskov and Gorky. His use of Russian language formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. Pushkin was recognized by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, his successor and pupil, the great Russian critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, who produced the fullest and deepest critical study of Pushkin's work, which still retains much of its relevance. Alexander Pushkin became an inseparable part of the literary world of the Russian people. He also exerted a profound influence on other aspects of Russian culture, most notably in opera. Translated into all the major languages, his works are regarded both as expressing most completely Russian national consciousness and as transcending national barriers. Pushkin's intelligence, sharpness of his opinion, his devotion to poetry, realistic thinking and incredible historical and political intuition make him one of the greatest Russian national geniuses.

''The secret journal''

In 1986, a book entitled ''Secret Journal 1836–1837'' was published by a Minneapolis publishing house (M.I.P. Company), claiming to be the decoded content of an encrypted private journal kept by Pushkin. Promoted with few details about its contents, and touted for many years as being 'banned in Russia', it was an erotic novel narrated from Pushkin's perspective. Some mail-order publishers still carry the work under its fictional description. In 2001 it was first published in Moscow by Ladomir Publishing House which created a scandal. In 2006 a bilingual Russian-English edition was published in Russia by Retro Publishing House. Now published in 24 countries. Staged in Paris in 2006. In 2011 new editions were published in France by Belfond and in the USA by M.I.P. Company.

Honours

The Pushkin Trust was established in 1987 by the Duchess of Abercorn to commemorate the creative legacy and spirit of her ancestor Alexander Pushkin and to release the creativity and imagination of the children of Ireland by providing them with opportunities to communicate their thoughts, feelings and experiences.

A minor planet, 2208 Pushkin, discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh is named after him. A crater on Mercury is also named in his honour.

MS ''Alexandr Pushkin'' second ship of the Russian Ivan Franko class (also referred to as "poet" or "writer" class).

Gallery

List of works

Narrative Poems

1820 – ''Ruslan i Lyudmila (Руслан и Людмила)''; English translation: ''Ruslan and Ludmila''

1820–21 – ''Kavkazskiy plennik (Кавказский пленник)''; English translation: ''The Prisoner of the Caucasus''

1821 – ''Gavriiliada (Гавриилиада)'' ; English translation: ''The Gabrieliad''

1821–22 – ''Bratya razboyniki (Братья разбойники)''; English translation: ''The Robber Brothers''

1823 – ''Bakhchisaraysky fontan (Бахчисарайский фонтан)''; English translation: ''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray''

1824 – ''Tsygany (Цыганы)''; English translation: ''The Gypsies''

1825 – ''Graf Nulin (Граф Нулин)''; English translation: ''Count Nulin''

1829 – ''Poltava (Полтава)''; English translation: ''Poltava''

1830 – ''Domik v Kolomne (Домик в Коломне)''; English translation: ''The Little House in Kolomna''

1833 – ''Andjelo (Анджело)''; English translation: ''Angelo''

1833 – ''Medny vsadnik (Медный всадник)''; English translation: ''The Bronze Horseman''

Verse novel

1825–32 – ''Yevgeny Onegin (Евгений Онегин)''; English translation: ''Eugene Onegin''

Drama

1825 – ''Boris Godunov (Борис Годунов)''; English translation: ''Boris Godunov''

1830 – ''Malenkie tragedii (Маленькие трагедии)''; English translation: ''The Little Tragedies''

* ''Kamenny gost (Каменный гость)''; English translation: ''The Stone Guest''

* ''Motsart i Salyeri (Моцарт и Сальери)''; English translation: ''Mozart and Salieri''

* ''Skupoy rytsar (Скупой рыцарь)''; English translations: ''The Miserly Knight, The Covetous Knight''

* ''Pir vo vremya chumy (Пир во время чумы)''; English translation: ''A Feast in Time of Plague''

Prose

1831 – ''Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Повести покойного Ивана Петровича Белкина)''; English translation: ''The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin''

* ''Vystrel (Выстрел)''; English translation: ''The Shot'', short story

* ''Metel (Метель)''; English translation: ''The Blizzard'', short story

* ''Grobovschik (Гробовщик)''; English translation: ''The Undertaker'', short story

* ''Stanzionny smotritel (Станционный смотритель)''; English translation: ''The Stationmaster'', short story

* ''Baryshnya-krestyanka (Барышня-крестьянка)''; English translation: ''The Squire's Daughter'', short story

1834 – ''Pikovaya dama (Пиковая дама)''; English translation: ''The Queen of Spades'', short story

1834 – ''Kirdzhali (Кирджали)''; English translation: ''Kirdzhali'', short story

1834 – ''Istoriya Pugacheva (История Пугачева)''; English translation: ''A History of Pugachev'', study of the Pugachev's Rebellion

1836 – ''Kapitanskaya dochka (Капитанская дочка)''; English translation: ''The Captain's Daughter'', novel

1836 – ''Puteshestvie v Arzrum (Путешествие в Арзрум)''; English translation: ''A Journey to Arzrum'', travel sketches

1836 – ''Roslavlev (Рославлев)''; English translation: ''Roslavlev'', unfinished novel

1837 – ''Arap Petra Velikogo (Арап Петра Великого)''; English translation: ''Peter the Great's Negro'', unfinished novel

1837 – ''Istoriya sela Goryuhina (История села Горюхина)''; English translation: ''The Story of the Village of Goryukhino'', unfinished short story

1837 – ''Yegipetskie nochi (Египетские ночи)''; English translation: ''Egyptian Nights'', unfinished short story

1841 – ''Dubrovsky (Дубровский)''; English translation: ''Dubrovsky'', unfinished novel

Fairy Tales in verse

1830 – ''Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде''; English translation: ''The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda''

1830 – ''Сказка о медведихе''; English translation: ''The Tale of the Female Bear'' (was not finished)

1831 – ''Сказка о царе Салтане''; English translation: ''The Tale of Tsar Saltan''

1833 – ''Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке''; English translation: ''The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish''

1833 – ''Сказка о мертвой царевне''; English translation: ''The Tale of the Dead Princess''

1834 – ''Сказка о золотом петушке''; English translation: ''The Tale of the Golden Cockerel''

See also

Anton Delvig

Anna Petrovna Kern

Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy

''Literaturnaya Gazeta''

Pushkin Prize

Skazka

Vasily Pushkin

Vladimir Dal

References

Further reading

Binyon, T. J. (2002) ''Pushkin: A Biography''. London: HarperCollins ISBN 0-00-215084-0; US edition: New York: Knopf, 2003 ISBN 1-4000-4110-4

Yuri Druzhnikov (2008) ''Prisoner of Russia: Alexander Pushkin and the Political Uses of Nationalism'', Transaction Publishers ISBN 1-56000-390-1

Dunning, Chester, Emerson, Caryl, Fomichev, Sergei, Lotman, Lidiia, Wood, Antony (Translator) ( 2006) ''The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy'' University of Wisconsin Press ISBN 0-299-20760-9

Feinstein, Elaine (ed.) (1999) ''After Pushkin: versions of the poems of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by contemporary poets''. Manchester: Carcanet Press; London: Folio Society ISBN 1-85754-444-7

Pogadaev, Victor (2003) ''Penyair Agung Rusia Pushkin dan Dunia Timur (The Great Russian Poet Pushkin and the Oriental World)''. Monograph Series. Centre For Civilisational Dialogue. University Malaya. 2003, ISBN 983-3070-06-X

Vitale, Serena (1998) ''Pushkin's button''; transl. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 1-85702-937-2

Телетова, Н. К. (Teletova, N. K.) (2007) ''Забытые родственные связи А.С. Пушкина'' (''The forgotten family connections of A. S. Pushkin''). Saint Petersburg: Dorn

Wolfe, Markus (1998) ''Freemasonry in life and literature''. Munich: Otto Sagner ltd. ISBN 3-87690-692-X

Wachtel, Michael. "Pushkin and the Wikipedia" ''Pushkin Review'' 12-13: 163-66, 2009–2010

External links

Biographical essay on Pushkin. By Mike Phillips, British Library (Pdf).

The ''Pushkin Review'', annual journal of North American Pushkin Society. Retrieved 2010-10-19

Pushkin's African Background, British Library. Gallery and genealogy. Retrieved 2010-10-19

Pushkin's poems from Stihi.ru, Russian and English "I Loved You", "I Outlived My Own Yearnings" Retrieved 2010-10-19

Category:1799 births Category:1837 deaths Category:People from Moscow Category:Romantic poets Category:Russian people of Black African descent Category:Russian people of German descent Category:Russian people of Swedish descent Category:19th-century Russian people Category:Deaths by firearm in Russia Category:Duelling fatalities Category:Duellists Category:French-language poets Category:Russian dramatists and playwrights Category:Russian-language poets Category:Russian nobility Category:Russian novelists Category:Russian historical novelists Category:Russian poets Category:Russian short story writers Category:19th-century theatre Category:Translators of Dante Alighieri Category:Translators from Italian

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The following is a list of significant men and women known for being the father, mother, or considered the founders mostly in Western socities in a field, listed by category. In most non-science fields, the title of being the "father" is debatable.

Church

Games

Subject	Father/Mother	Reason
Miniature wargaming	H.G. Wells
	Shigeru Miyamoto	Creator of many successful Nintendo franchises
PlayStation	Ken Kutaragi
Role-playing game	Gary Gygax	Creator of ''Dungeons & Dragons''
Stealth game	Hideo Kojima
Video game	Ralph H. Baer	Inventor of the video game console
Wargaming	Charles S. Roberts

Humanities

Military

Subject	Father/Mother	Reason
Aerial warfare	Oswald Boelcke	The first to formalize rules of air fighting, which he presented as the Dicta Boelcke, also credited as being the first pilot to shoot down an aircraft.
Atomic bomb	Robert OppenheimerLeó SzilárdEnrico Fermi
Blitzkrieg	Heinz Guderian
	Edward Teller
Atomic submarine and "nuclear navy"	Hyman G. Rickover
Fourth Generation Warfare	William S. Lind
	Jean-Baptiste Colbert	Built on the fleet of France inherited from Cardinal Richelieu.
Naval Special Warfare	Phil H. Bucklew	US Naval Officer and First Commanding Officer of Navy SEAL Team One
Naval tactical studies	Paul Hoste	Jesuit Professor of Mathematics at the Royal College of the Marine in Toulon; wrote ''L'Art des Armées Navales'' (1697)
Luftwaffe and Luftstreitkräfte	Oswald Boelcke
The Soviet Union's Hydrogen Bomb	Andrei Sakharov
	William C. Lee	First commander of the parachute school at Fort Benning, Georgia.
	Kazimierz Pułaski	Brigadier-general and commander of the cavalry of the Continental Army (1770s).
United States Navy
Subject	Father/Mother	! Reason
[[American Football">John Barry (naval officer)

Nations

Natural and social sciences

Sports

Subject	Father/Mother	! Reason
[[American Football	Walter Camp
		Godfather, created the New York Cosmos soccer team and imported a number of well known international footballers to the team in an attempt to bring interest to soccer in the US.
Angling	Izaak Walton	author of ''The Compleat Angler''
Association football	Ebenezer Cobb Morley
	Charles William Miller
Baseball
Basketball	James Naismith
	Scot Breithaupt
	Eugen Sandow
Harold Zinkin	Called so by Arnold Schwarzenegger during a press statement on his passing in 2004. Inventor of the modern exercise machines.
	James Figg
James J. Corbett
	Jim Downing	Built a racecar a season before it became the basis of a new lightweight prototype class in .
Canadian rodeo		coined the rodeo term ''Stampede'' and was world's first rodeo producer/rodeo stock contractor/rodeo champion in 1902
	Wally Parks
Don Garlits	Considered to be one of the innovators of drag racing safety.
Eddie Hill	Regarded as the Forefather of Drag Racing.
	Kunimitsu Takahashi
Modern figure skating	Jackson Haines
The Football Association	Ebenezer Cobb Morley	Founder
rowspan="2"	James Richardson Spensley
William Garbutt	Laying the foundations of skilled coaching in Italian football
Freestyle BMX	Bob Haro
Freestyle Motocross	Mike Metzger	Godfather
Funny Car	Dick Landy
	Frank Chirkinian	Personally responsible for much of the production conventions of modern golf broadcasting.
rowspan="2"		Credited for introducing baseball in Japan
Hiroshi Hiraoka	Credited for establishing the first baseball team
Jogging	Jim Fixx	Founding father
Karting	Art Ingels	Developed the world's first kart (1956)
Lacrosse	William George Beers	Codified the sport
Mixed martial arts	Bruce Lee	Called so by Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. For his experimentation into other styles and invention of Jeet Kune Do.
American motocross	Edison Dye	Introduced motorcross to American riders
NASCAR	Bill France, Sr.	Foundation of the sanctioning body for stock car racing
Road racing in the United States	Cameron Argetsinger
Rugby union	A. G. Guillemard	William Webb Ellis			(William Webb Ellis)"WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT THUS ORIGINATING THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF THE RUGBY GAME"
	Italo Santelli
Florida Skateboarding	Bruce Walker
East Coast Skateboarding	Vinny Raffa
	Skip Engblom
Tony Hawk
Snowboard	Jake Burton
Supercross	Mike Goodwin	Organized the first supercross race
Modern surfing	Duke Kahanamoku

Technology

Fields

Subject	Father/Mother	Reason
Aerodynamics (modern)	Sir George Cayley	Founding father of modern Aerodynamics. The first to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight—weight, Lift (force)
[[Architecture	Imhotep	Built the first pyramid
Astronautics	Konstantin Tsiolkovsky	Robert H. GoddardHermann Oberth
Aviation		Book: ''Prodromo alla Arte Maestra'' (1670). First to describe the geometry and physics of a flying vessel.
	Thomas Tompion
Clinical trials	James Lind	Conducted the first Scientific control
[[Computing	Charles Babbage	Inventor of the Analytical Engine which was never constructed in his lifetime.
Cybernetics	Norbert Wiener
	William F. Moran	Founder of the American Bladesmith Society
	Bob Loveless	Founder of the Knifemakers' Guild
Photography

Inventions

Subject	Father/Mother	Reason
Air conditioning	Willis Carrier
Chronograph
Compact Disc
Compiler	Grace Hopper
	Konrad Zuse	Invented world's first functional program-controlled computer.
Alan Turing	Was a secret code breaker during WWII and invented the Turing machine (1936).
John von Neumann	Became "intrigued" with Turing's universal machine and later emphasised the importance of the stored-program concept for electronic computing (1945), including the possibility of allowing the machine to modify its own program in useful ways while running.
	Invented the digital computer in the 1930s
Computer Program	Ada Lovelace	Recognized by historians as the writer of the world's first computer program which was for the Charles Babbage Analytical Engine, but was never complete within either her or his lifetime.
Ekranoplan	Rostislav Alexeev
Helicopter	Igor Sikorsky	Invented the first successful helicopter, upon which further designs were based.
Internet	Vint CerfBob Kahn
Instant noodle	Momofuku Ando	Inventor of the instant noodle, also founder of Nissin Foods to produce and market them.
Japanese television	Kenjiro Takayanagi
Jet engine	Frank Whittle
Karaoke	Daisuke Inoue	Inventor of the machine as a means of allowing people to sing without the need of a live back-up.
Laser	Charles Hard Townes
Lightning prediction system	Alexander Stepanovich Popov	The first lightning prediction system, the Lightning detector, was invented in 1894 by Alexander Stepanovich Popov.
Marine chronometer	John Harrison
Microprocessor	Marcian Hoff Masatoshi Shima
Mobile phone		He is the main brainchild of hand-held phone and with the help of Motorola team he developed the first handset in 1973 weighing in at two kilos.
	Vinod Dham	The original Pentium (P5) was developed by a team of engineers, including John H. Crawford, chief architect of the original 386, and Donald Alpert, who managed the architectural team. Dror Avnon managed the design of the FPU. Dham was general manager of the P5 group. Some media sources have called him the "father of the Pentium".
	Chuck Peddle	Developed the 6502 microprocessor, the KIM-1 and the Commodore PET
Programmable logic controller	Dick Morley
Radio	Alexander Stepanovich Popov Lee De Forest Guglielmo Marconi Jagdish Chandra Bose Nikola Tesla
Radio (Radio broadcasting)	Reginald Fessenden David Sarnoff	Fessenden is credited as the first to broadcast radio signals on Christmas Eve, 1906. Sarnoff proposed a chain of radio stations to Marconi's associates in 1915.
Radio (FM radio)	Edwin H. Armstrong	Obtained the first Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license to operate an FM station in Alpine, New Jersey at approximately 50 megahertz (1939)
Radiotelephony	Reginald Fessenden
SGML	Charles Goldfarb
Telephone	Antonio Meucci	Alexander Graham Bell	See Invention of the telephone
Television	Philo T. Farnsworth			Vladimir Zworykin			John Logie Baird	Co-Inventors of the Electronic Television. Farnsworth invented the Image dissector while Zworykin created the Iconoscope, both fully electronic forms of television. Logie Baird invented the world's first working television system, also the first electronic color television system.
Tokamak	Lev Artsimovich
	Fazlur Khan	Invented the tube structural system and first employed it in his designs for the DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments, John Hancock Center and Sears Tower.
World Wide Web	Tim Berners-Lee
Visual Basic	Alan Cooper
XML	Jon Bosak

Towns and cities

Subject	Father/Mother	! Reason
Lan Kwai Fong	Allan Zeman	Noted for turning a small square of streets in
Subject	Father/Mother	! Reason
	[[Henry Ford">Central, Hong Kong

Transport

Subject	Father/Mother	! Reason
	[[Henry Ford	Noted for introducing a simple and affordable car for the ordinary American masses.
American Interstate Highway System	Dwight D. Eisenhower
	Gene Berg
Hot rod	Ed Winfield
	RJ DeVera	Influential for popularising the import car scene in the mid-1990s.
Kustom Kulture
Monster truck
Mountain bike	Gary Fisher
Rotary engine	Felix Wankel
	Cyrus Avery
Tailfin	Harley Earl
Traffic safety	William Phelps Eno
	Frank W. Cyr

See also

List of inventors

Father of medicare

Founders of statistics

References

Father or mother of something Father or mother of something, List of people known as

ar:آباء العلوم fa:فهرست افراد دارای لقب پدر یا مادر در یک زمینه

Coordinates	52°05′36″N5°7′10″N
name	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
birth name	Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
birth date	November 11, 1821
birth place	Moscow, Russian Empire
death date	February 09, 1881
death place	Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist
language	Russian
nationality	Russian
period	1846–1881
religion	Russian Orthodox
notableworks	''Notes from Underground''''Crime and Punishment''''The Idiot''''The Brothers Karamazov''
spouse	Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (1857–64) [her death] Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (1867–1881) [his death]
children	Sofiya (1868), Lyubov (1869—1926), Fyodor (1875–1878)
signature	Fyodor Dostoyevsky Signature.svg }}

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels ''Crime and Punishment'', ''The Idiot'' and ''The Brothers Karamazov''.

Dostoyevsky's literary works explored human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, Dostoyevsky wrote, with the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", '' Notes from Underground'' (1864), which was called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann. Dostoyevsky is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Biography

Early life

thumb|240px|Mariinsky Hospital in Moscow, Dostoyevsky's birthplaceDostoyevsky was born in Moscow, the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail was a doctor and a devout Christian, who practiced at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The family lived in a small apartment in the hospital grounds, and it wasn't until he was 16 years old, that Dostoyevsky moved to St Petersburg to attend a Military Engineering Institute. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas; local landmarks included a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent in his life and works. Although it was forbidden by his parents, Dostoyevsky liked to wander out to the hospital garden, where the patients sat to catch a glimpse of the sun. The young Dostoyevsky appreciated spending time with these patients and listening to their stories.

There are many stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children, but this despotism was tempered by his extreme care for his children and their upbringing. After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted the flies that came near his head. But the father was also careful to send his children to private schools where they would not be beaten. In the opinion of Joseph Frank, author of a definitive biography of Dostoyevsky, the father figure in ''The Brothers Karamazov'' is not based on Dostoyevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they did have a fairly loving relationship.

In 1837, shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis, Dostoyevsky and his brother were sent to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, nowadays called the Military Engineering-Technical University. Fyodor's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs. According to one account, the serfs became enraged during one of his drunken fits of violence, and after restraining him, poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. A similar account appears in ''Notes from Underground''. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented the story of his murder so that he could buy the estate at a cheaper price. Some, like Sigmund Freud in his 1928 article, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", have argued that his father's personality had influenced the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and sentimental buffoon", father of the main characters in his 1880 novel ''The Brothers Karamazov'', but such claims fail to withstand the scrutiny of many critics.

Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy and his first seizure occurred when he was nine years old. Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoyevsky's experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in his novel ''The Idiot'' and that of Smerdyakov in ''The Brothers Karamazov'', among others.

At the Saint Petersburg Institute of Military Engineering Dostoyevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well in the exams and received a commission in 1841. That year, influenced by the German poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller, he wrote two romantic plays: ''Mary Stuart'' and ''Boris Godunov''. The plays have not been preserved. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when he was a young man. He also revered Schiller at that age. However, in the years during which he wrote his great masterpieces, his opinions changed and he sometimes made fun of Schiller.

Dostoyevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering Academy the following year. He completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel ''Eugénie Grandet'' in 1843, but it brought him little to no attention. Dostoyevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army. In 1846, his first work, the epistolary short novel, ''Poor Folk'', printed in the almanac ''A Petersburg Collection'' (published by N. Nekrasov), was met with great acclaim. As legend has it, the editor of the magazine, poet Nikolai Nekrasov, walked into the office of liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky and announced, "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his followers, and many others agreed. After the novel was fully published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.

In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella, ''The Double'', a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life. Dostoyevsky's fame began to fade. Much of his work after ''Poor Folk'' received ambivalent reviews and it seemed that Belinsky's prediction that Dostoyevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken.

Exile in Siberia

Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year, Dostoyevsky, along with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Later, Dostoyevsky described his years of suffering to his brother, as being, "shut up in a coffin." In describing the dilapidated barracks which "should have been torn down years ago", he wrote: '' This experience inspired him to write ''The House of the Dead''.

Dostoyevsky was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. He spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan. While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. After her husband's death, they married in February 1857.

Post-prison maturation as a writer

Dostoyevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. First, his ordeal somehow caused him to become disillusioned with "Western" ideas; he repudiated the contemporary Western European philosophical movements, and instead paid greater tribute in his writings to traditional, rustic Russian values exemplified in the Slavophile concept of ''sobornost''. But even more significantly, he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith. Dostoyevsky would later depict his conversion experience in the short story, ''The Peasant Marey'' (1876).

In his writings, Dostoyevsky started to extol the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering. He now displayed a much more critical stance on contemporary European philosophy and turned with intellectual rigour against the Nihilist and Socialist movements; and much of his post-prison work—particularly the novel, ''The Possessed'', and the essays, ''The Diary of a Writer''—contains both criticism of socialist and nihilist ideas, as well as thinly veiled parodies of contemporary Western-influenced Russian intellectuals (Timofey Granovskiy), revolutionaries (Sergey Nyechayev), and even fellow novelists (Ivan Turgyenyev). In social circles, Dostoyevsky allied himself with well-known conservatives, such as the statesman Konstantin Pobyedonostsyev. His post-prison essays praised the tenets of the Pochvyennichyestvo movement, a late-19th century Russian nativist ideology closely aligned with Slavophilism.

Dostoyevsky's post-prison fiction abandoned the Western European-style domestic melodramas and quaint character studies of his youthful work in favor of dark, more complex storylines and situations, played-out by brooding, tortured characters—often styled partly on Dostoyevsky himself—who agonized over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and the psychological confusion caused by the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this does not take from the debt which Dostoyevsky owed to earlier Western-influenced writers such as Gogol whose work grew from the irrational and anti-authoritarian spiritualist ideas contained within the Romantic movement which had immediately preceded Dostoyevsky in West Europe. However, Dostoyevsky's major novels focused on the idea that utopia and positivist ideas were unrealistic and unobtainable.

Later literary career

In December 1859, Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, ''Vremya'' (Time) and ''Epokha'' (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail. The former was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863. That year Dostoyevsky traveled to Europe and frequented gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for Dostoyevsky's "proud women", such as the two characters named Katerina Ivanovna, in ''Crime and Punishment'' and in ''The Brothers Karamazov''.

Dostoyevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, which was followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts; furthermore, he decided to assume the responsibility of his deceased brother's outstanding debts, as well providing for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. Dostoyevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.

Dostoyevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion and its consequences. He completed ''Crime and Punishment'', possibly his best known novel, in a mad hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoyevsky wrote ''The Gambler'' simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoyevsky's writings.

Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Suslova, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoyevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer. Shortly before marrying her in 1867, he dictated ''The Gambler'' to her. From 1873 to 1881 he published the ''Writer's Diary'', a monthly journal of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events. The journal was an enormous success.

Dostoyevsky influenced, and was himself influenced, by the philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov was the inspiration for the characters Ivan Karamazov and Alyosha Karamazov.

In 1877, Dostoyevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy. On 8 June 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. In his later years, Dostoyevsky lived for an extended period at the resort of Staraya Russa in northwestern Russia, which was closer to Saint Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts.

Death

Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. A copy of the New Testament Bible given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.

His tombstone reads; ''Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.'' (Excerpt from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, ''The Brothers Karamazov''.)

The rented apartment where he died and spent the last few years of his life is where he wrote his final novel ''The Brothers Karamazov''. The apartment, situated in a building at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok, has been restored with old photographs to how it looked when he lived there. It opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum and is a popular tourist attraction in the city.

Influence

Some, like journalist Otto Friedrich, consider Dostoyevsky to be one of Europe's major novelists, while others like Vladimir Nabokov maintain that from a point of view of enduring art and individual genius, he is a rather mediocre writer who produced wastelands of literary platitudes.

Dostoyevsky promoted in his novels religious moralities, particularly those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, "Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering," the essay devoted to Dostoyevsky in Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé's ''Le roman russe'' (1886), is widely considered to be the most influential early analysis of the novelist's work, introducing Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists to the West. Nabokov argued in his University courses at Cornell, that such religious propaganda, rather than artistic qualities, was the main reason Dostoyevsky was praised and regarded as a 'Prophet' in Soviet Russia.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf praised his prose. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoyevsky as a major influence on his work, in his posthumous collection of sketches ''A Moveable Feast''. In a book of interviews with Arthur Power (''Conversations with James Joyce''), Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose:

'''' In her essay ''The Russian Point of View'', Virginia Woolf said:

''

Dostoyevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human psychology in his major works. He created an opus of vitality and almost hypnotic power, characterized by feverishly dramatized scenes where his characters are frequently in scandalous and explosive atmospheres, passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues. The quest for God, the problem of evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels.

His characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing Christians (Prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov, Saint Ambrose of Optina), self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchees (Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov), and rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives. In comparison with Tolstoy, whose characters are realistic, the characters of Dostoyevsky are usually more symbolic of the ideas they represent, thus Dostoyevsky is often cited as one of the forerunners of Literary Symbolism, especially Russian Symbolism (see Alexander Blok). Dostoyevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and this enables him to get rid of one of the dominant traits of realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux; his characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, by definition, timeless. Other themes include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering, rejection of the West and affirmation of the Russian Orthodox Church and of tsarism. Literary scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin have characterized his work as "polyphonic": Dostoyevsky does not appear to aim for a "single vision", and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoyevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.

Dostoyevsky and the other giant of late 19th century Russian literature, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, never met in person, even though each praised, criticized, and influenced the other (Dostoyevsky remarked of Tolstoy's ''Anna Karenina'' that it was a "flawless work of art"; Henri Troyat reports that Tolstoy once remarked of ''Crime and Punishment'' that, "Once you read the first few chapters you know pretty much how the novel will end up"). There was a meeting arranged, but there was a confusion about where the meeting was to take place and they never rescheduled. Tolstoy wept when he learned of Dostoyevsky's death. A copy of ''The Brothers Karamazov'' was found on the nightstand next to Tolstoy's deathbed at the Astapovo railway station.

Dostoyevsky on Jews in Russia

Several writers (including Joseph Frank, Stephen Cassedy, David I. Goldstein, Gary Saul Morson, and Felix Dreizin) have offered various insights and suppositions regarding Dostoyevsky’s views on Jews and organized Jewry in Russia — one such view is that Dostoyevsky perceived Jewish ethnocentrism and Jewish influence to be directly threatening the Russian peasantry in the border regions. In ''A Writer's Diary'', Dostoyevsky wrote:

Thus, Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre. And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population—instead of this the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native population in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew—and has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness to us, only by the thirst for our sweat and blood.

And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They have always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent. Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that status of status of his, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew...

Dostoyevsky has been noted as both having expressed antisemitic sentiments as well as standing up for the rights of the Jewish people. In a review of Joseph Frank's book, ''The Mantle of the Prophet'', Orlando Figes notes that ''A Writer's Diary'' is "filled with politics, literary criticism, and pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire, [and] represents a major challenge to the Dostoyevsky fan, not least on account of its frequent expressions of anti-semitism." Frank, in his foreword for David I. Goldstein's book ''Dostoevsky and the Jews'', attempts to place Dostoyevsky as a product of his time. Frank notes that Dostoyevsky made antisemitic remarks, but that Dostoyevsky's writing and stance, by and large, was one where Dostoyevsky held a great deal of guilt for his comments and positions that were antisemitic.

Steven Cassedy alleges in his book, ''Dostoevsky's Religion'', that much of the depiction of Dostoyevsky's views as antisemitic omits that Dostoyevsky expressed support for the equal rights of the Russian Jewish population, an unpopular position in Russia at the time. Cassedy also notes that this criticism of Dostoyevsky also appears to deny his sincerity when he said that he was for equal rights for the Russian Jewish populace and the serfs of his own country (since neither group at that point in history had equal rights). Cassedy again notes when Dostoyevsky stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic. Even though Dostoyevsky spoke of the potential negative influence of Jewish people, Dostoyevsky advised Czar Alexander II of Russia to give them rights to positions of influence in Russian society, such as allowing them access to Professorships at Universities. According to Cassedy, labeling Dostoyevsky anti-Semitic does not take into consideration Dostoyevsky's expressed desire to peacefully reconcile Jews and Christians into a single universal brotherhood of all mankind.

Dostoyevsky and existentialism

With the publication of ''Crime and Punishment'', in 1866, Dostoyevsky became one of Russia's most prominent authors. Will Durant, in ''The Pleasures of Philosophy'' (1953), called Dostoyevsky one of the founding fathers of the philosophical movement known as existentialism, and cited ''Notes from Underground'' in particular as a founding work of existentialism. For Dostoyevsky, war is the people's rebellion against the idea that reason guides everything, and thus, reason is not the ultimate guiding principle for either history or mankind. After his 1849 exile to the city of Omsk, Siberia, Dostoyevsky focused heavily on notions of suffering and despair in many of his works.

Frederich Nietzsche referred to Dostoyevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that ''Notes from Underground'' "cried truth from the blood." According to Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The Great Catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian Neo-Idealism", Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoyevsky in his notes and drafts throughout the winter of 1886–1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky's works.

Freud wrote an article titled ''Dostoevsky and Parricide'', asserting that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide; though he is critical of Dostoyevsky's work overall, his inclusion of ''The Brothers Karamazov'' among the three greatest works of literature is remarkable.

Bibliography

Fiction

Dostoyevsky's works of fiction includes 15 novels and novellas and 17 short stories. Many of his longer novels were first published in serialized form in various literary magazines and journals (see the individual articles). The years given below indicate the year in which the novel's final part or first complete book edition was published. Because English translations of Dostoyevsky's works have differentiated throughout the years, many of his novels and short stories are known by several titles.

Novels and novellas

''Poor Folk'' (Бедные люди [''Bednye lyudi''], 1846)

''The Double: A Petersburg Poem'' (Двойник: Петербургская поэма [''Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema''], 1846)

''Netochka Nezvanova'' (Неточка Незванова [''Netochka Nezvanova''], 1849)

''Uncle's Dream'' (Дядюшкин сон [''Dyadyushkin son''], 1859)

''The Village of Stepanchikovo'' (Село Степанчиково и его обитатели [''Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli''], 1859)

''Humiliated and Insulted'' (Униженные и оскорбленные [''Unizhennye i oskorblennye''], 1861)

''The House of the Dead'' (Записки из мертвого дома [''Zapiski iz mertvogo doma''], 1862)

''Notes from Underground'' (Записки из подполья [''Zapiski iz podpolya''], 1864)

''Crime and Punishment'' (Преступление и наказание [''Prestuplenie i nakazanie''], 1866)

''The Gambler'' (Игрок [''Igrok''], 1867)

''The Idiot'' (Идиот [''Idiot''], 1869). Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle.

''The Eternal Husband'' (Вечный муж [''Vechnyj muzh''], 1870)

''Demons'' (Бесы [''Besy''], 1872)

''The Adolescent'' (Подросток [''Podrostok''], 1875)

''The Brothers Karamazov'' (Братья Карамазовы [''Brat'ya Karamazovy''], 1880)

Short stories

"Mr. Prokharchin" ("Господин Прохарчин" ["Gospodin Prokharchin"], 1846)

"Novel in Nine Letters" ("Роман в девяти письмах" ["Roman v devyati pis'mah"], 1847)

"The Landlady" ("Хозяйка" ["Hozyajka"], 1847)

"The Jealous Husband" ("Чужая жена и муж под кроватью" ["Chuzhaya zhena i muzh pod krovat'yu"], 1848)

"A Weak Heart" ("Слабое сердце" ["Slaboe serdze"], 1848)

"Polzunkov" ("Ползунков" ["Polzunkov"], 1848)

"The Honest Thief" ("Честный вор" ["Chestnyj vor"], 1848)

"The Christmas Tree and a Wedding" ("Елка и свадьба" ["Elka i svad'ba"], 1848)

"White Nights" ("Белые ночи" ["Belye nochi"], 1848)

"A Little Hero" ("Маленький герой" ["Malen'kij geroj"], 1849)

"A Nasty Anecdote" ("Скверный анекдот" ["Skvernyj anekdot"], 1862)

"The Crocodile" ("Крокодил" ["Krokodil"], 1865)

"Bobok" ("Бобок" ["Bobok"], 1873)

"The Heavenly Christmas Tree" ("Мальчик у Христа на ёлке" ["Mal'chik u Hrista na elke"], 1876)

"The Meek One" ("Кроткая" ["Krotkaja"], 1876)

"The Peasant Marey" ("Мужик Марей" ["Muzhik Marej"], 1876)

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" ("Сон смешного человека" ["Son smeshnogo cheloveka"], 1877)

Non-fiction

In addition to fiction, Dostoyevsky wrote occasional essays, most of which have been collected in ''A Writer's Diary''.

''Winter Notes on Summer Impressions'' (1863)

''A Writer's Diary'' (Дневник писателя [''Dnevnik pisatelya''], 1873–1881)

Letters (collected in English translations in five volumes of ''Complete Letters'')

See also

Albert Camus

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Existentialism

List of Russian philosophers

Lev Shestov

Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolay Strakhov

Russian Orthodox Church

Vasily Rozanov

References

Bibliography

External links

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Coordinates	52°05′36″N5°7′10″N
Name	Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Awards
Alma mater	Rostov State University
Birth date	December 11, 1918
Birth place	Kislovodsk, Russian SFSR
Death date	August 03, 2008
Death place	Moscow, Russia
Religion	Russian Orthodox
Spouse	Natalia Alekseyevna Reshetovskaya (1940–52; 1957–72)Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova (1973–2008)
Children	Yermolai Solzhenitsyn (b. 1970), Ignat Solzhenitsyn (b. 1972), Stepan Solzhenitsyn (b. 1973) (all by Natalia Svetlova)
Notableworks	''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'', ''The First Circle'', ''The Cancer Ward'', ''The Gulag Archipelago'', ''The Red Wheel''
Ethnicity	Russian, Ukrainian
Citizenship	USSR, Russian Federation
Occupation	Novelist, soldier, teacher
Website	http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/ }}

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ( , ) (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in ''The Gulag Archipelago'' and ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'', two of his best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet system had collapsed.

In the Soviet Union

Early years

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His mother, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (''née'' Shcherbak) was Ukrainian. Her father had apparently risen from humble beginnings, as something of a self-made man. Eventually, he acquired a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origins and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of ''August 1914'', and in the later ''Red Wheel'' novels.

In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was then raised by his widowed mother and aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.

As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn was developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on the First World War and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel ''August 1914'' – some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, at this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.

On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married a chemistry student Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They divorced in 1952 (a year before his release from the Gulag); he remarried her in 1957 and they divorced again in 1972. The following year (1973) he married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (b. 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973).

WWII

During World War II Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel ''Love the Revolution!'', chronicle his World War II experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.

Imprisonment

In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing derogatory comments in letters to friends about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called Khozyain" ("the master"), and "Balabos", (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew ''baal ha-bayis'' for "master of the house"). He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labor camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.

The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase," as he later referred to it, was spent in a ''sharashka'' (i.e., a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of ''Lev Rubin'' in his book ''The First Circle'', published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich''. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not diagnosed at the time.

In March 1953 after the expiry of Solzhenitsyn's sentence, he was sent to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in the northeastern region of Kazakhstan, very close to the current border with Russia, as was common for political prisoners. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel ''Cancer Ward'' and also found an echo in the short story "The right hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has some interesting parallels to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically-minded Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag: "I remember myself in my captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of ''The Gulag Archipelago'' ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem ''The Trail'' (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labor camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.

After prison

After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. After his return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote, "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."

In the 1960s while he was publicly known to be writing ''Cancer Ward'', he was simultaneously writing ''The Gulag Archipelago''. The KGB found out about this. Finally, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the ''Noviy Mir'' magazine, with the manuscript of ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich''. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book became an instant hit and sold-out everywhere. During Khrushchev's tenure, ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' was studied in schools in the Soviet Union as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his acclaimed short story ''Matryona's Home'', were published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.

''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' brought the Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the twenties on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most Soviet readers realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came quietly, but perceptibly, to a close.

Persecutions

{|class="toccolours" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 90%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:20em; max-width: 50%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"|"Every time when we speak about Solzhenitsyn as the enemy of the Soviet regime, this just happens to coincide with some important [international] events and we postpone the decision." |- |style="text-align: left;"| – Andrei Kirilenko, a Politburo member. |} Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, ''The Cancer Ward'', legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations (this episode is recounted and documented in ''The Oak and the Calf'').

The publishing of his work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of ''The First Circle''. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the monumental ''The Gulag Archipelago''. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which had come close to second nature, but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967 the preparatory drafts of ''The Gulag Archipelago'' were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education in a Lubyanka Prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution, however, since such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relations with the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.

''The Gulag Archipelago'' was composed during 1958–1967. This work was a three-volume, seven part work on the Soviet prison camp system (Solzhenitsyn never had all seven parts of the work in front of him at any one time). ''The Gulag Archipelago'' has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It discussed the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Lenin himself having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile.

''The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology made ''The Gulag Archipelago'' one of the most consequential books of the twentieth century. The appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities.

During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.

In the West

On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the USSR to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of ''The Gulag Archipelago'' and, less than a week later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attache William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).

In Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in Cologne. He then moved to Zurich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, 8 June 1978 he gave his Commencement Address condemning, among other things, materialism in modern western culture.

Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his cyclical history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, ''The Red Wheel''. By 1992, four "knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.

Despite spending two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (for example, before being denied the opportunity by then-president Gerald Ford, Ford administration staffers Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf to speak directly to the president about the Soviet threat), alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion. Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ... by TV stupor and by intolerable music". Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."

In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England during his western exile. He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'"

Return to Russia

In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his oldest son Yermolai returned to Russia to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia and called for a restoration of the Russian monarchy. After returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (''The Grain Between the Millstones'') among many other writings.

All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.

Death

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on Wednesday, 6 August 2008. He was buried on the same date at the place chosen by him in Donskoy necropolis. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.

Legacy

The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's collected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three volumes, already in print, recently took place in Moscow. Unhappy with the economic and social malaise of the Yeltsin era, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for President Vladimir Putin's attempts to restore a sense of national pride in Russia. Putin signed a decree conferring on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work and personally visited the writer at his home on 12 June 2007 to present him with the award. Like his father, Yermolai Solzhenitsyn has translated some of his father's works. Stephan Solzhenitsyn lives and works in Moscow. Ignat Solzhenitsyn is the music director of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.

KGB operations against Solzhenitsyn

On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.

KGB sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between PAUK and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that everyone in his surrounding was a KGB agent and deceiving him in all possible ways. Among other things, the writer constantly received envelopes with photographs of car accidents, brain surgery and other frightening illustrations. After the KGB harassment in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others and surrounded his property with a barbed wire fence. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.

Accusations of collaboration with NKVD

In his book ''The Gulag Archipelago'' Solzhenitsyn states that he was recruited to report to the NKVD on fellow inmates and was given a code-name Vetrov, but due to his transfer to another camp he was able to elude this duty and never produced a single report.

In 1976, after Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union a report signed by Vetrov surfaced. After a copy of the report was obtained by Solzhenitsyn he published it together with a refutation in the Los Angeles Times (published 24 May 1976). In 1978 the same report was published by journalist Frank Arnau in a socialist Western German magazine Neue Politik. However, according to Solzhenitsyn the report is a fabrication by the KGB. He claimed that the report is dated 20 January 1952 while all Ukrainians were transferred to a separate camp on 6 January and they had no relation to the uprising in Solzhenitsyn's camp on 22 January. He also claimed that the only people who might in 1976 have access to a "secret KGB archive" were KGB agents themselves. Solzhenitsyn also requested Arnau to put the alleged document to a graphology test but Arnau refused.

In 1990 the report was reproduced in Soviet ''Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal'' among the memoirs of L.A. Samutin, a former ROA soldier and GULAG inmate who was an erstwhile supporter of Solzhenitsyn, but later became his critic. According to Solzhenitzyn, publication of the Samutin memoirs was canceled at the request of Samutin's widow, who stated that the memoirs were in fact dictated by the KGB.

Views on atheism, history, and politics

About the putative failing of atheism, Solzhenitsyn declared:

On Russia and the Jews

Solzhenitsyn also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (''Two Hundred Years Together'' 2001, 2002). This book stirred controversy and caused Solzhenitsyn to be widely accused of anti-Semitism.

The book became a best-seller in Russia. Solzhenitsyn begins this work with a plea for "patient mutual comprehension" on the part of Russians and Russian Jews. The author writes that the book was conceived in the hope of promoting "mutually agreeable and fruitful pathways for the future development of Russian-Jewish relations".

There is sharp division on the allegation of anti-Semitism. From Solzhenitsyn's own essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", he calls for Russians and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically supported a Marxist dictatorship after the October Revolution. At the end of chapter 15, he writes that Jews must answer for the "revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russian Gentiles must repent "for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for...crazed revolutionary soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God." Writing of Solzhenitsyn's novel, ''August 1914'' in the ''New York Times'' on 13 November 1985, the American historian Richard Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".

According to D. M. Thomas, Elie Wiesel said Solzhenitsyn is not an anti-Semite. "he is too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer." He says he wishes Solzhenitsyn were more sensitive to Jewish suffering, but believes the insensitivity is unconscious. This statement however predates the publication in 2001 of "200 Years Together" by at least 3 years.

Similarities between ''Two Hundred years together'' and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself claims that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then manipulated, forty years ago. However, according to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.

In 1984 Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Nikolay Kazantsev, a monarchist Russo-Argentine journalist, for ''Nasha Strana'', a Russia-language newspaper based in Buenos Aires. In the interview he said: "We (Russia) are walking a narrow isthmus between Communists and the World Jewry. Neither is acceptable for us... And I mean this not in the racial sense, but in the sense of the Jewry as a certain world view. The Jewry is embodied in "Fevralism" (i.e. democracy). Neither side is acceptable to us in the case the War breaks out." He also described the United States as a "province of Israel".

Russian dissident writer Vladimir Voynovich, interviewed for Radio Liberty on the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn' death, has said that Solzhenitshyn harbored anti-Semitic sentiments all his life, as attested by the 1964 manuscript he later developed into "200 Years Together". Voynovich further alleged that Solzhenitsyn deliberately concealed this anti-Semitism, because he knew this would have prevented him from receiving the Nobel Prize.

On new Russian "democracy"

In some of his later political writings, such as ''Rebuilding Russia'' (1990) and ''Russia in Collapse'' (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to radical nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He sought to protect the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show, where he freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.

The West

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War. He criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. He said that the West erred in measuring other civilizations by its own model. While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities."

Shortly after Solzhenitsyn's death, Richard Pipes, a history professor at Harvard, wrote of him: "Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd.".

Russian culture

In his 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture, that the West erred in "denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it "

Communism, Russia and nationalism

Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not always forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.

In a speech commemorating the Vendée Uprising, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with Jacobins of the French Revolution. However, he commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent raged unabated from 1917 until the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s.

According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all ethnic cultures have been oppressed in favor of an atheistic Marxism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.

Solzhenitsyn said that for every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character and that he has never wished great power status for Russia. He rejected the view that the USA and Russia are natural rivals, saying that before the [Russian] revolution, they were natural allies and that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the Confederacy], and then they were allies in the First World War. But beginning with Communism, Russia ceased to exist and the confrontation was not at all with Russia but with the Communist Soviet Union.

World War II

Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West. While stationed in East Prussia as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against the civilian German population by Soviet "liberators" as the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were gang-raped to death. He wrote a poem entitled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In it, the first-person narrator seems to approve of the troops' crimes as revenge for German atrocities, expressing his desire to take part in the plunder himself. The poem describes the rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.

Stalinism

In his ''The Gulag Archipelago'' Solzhenitsyn rejected the view that it was Stalin who created the Soviet totalitarian state. He argued that it was Lenin who started the mass executions, created a planned economy, founded the Cheka which would later be turned into the KGB, and started the system of labor camps later known as Gulag.

Mikhail Sholokhov

Solzhenitsyn was the most prominent of the Nobel Laureate Mikhail Sholokhov's many detractors. He alleged that the work which made Sholokhov's international reputation, ''And Quiet Flows the Don'' was written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov scathing opinion re ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich''. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Sholokhov found the manuscript and published it under his own name. These rumors first appeared in the late 1920s, but an investigation upheld Sholokhov's authorship of ''And Quiet Flows the Don'' and the allegations were denounced as malicious slander in ''Pravda''.

A 1984 monograph by Geir Kjetsaa and others demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of ''Don''. And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated.

During the second world war, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed the fact of owning it. The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of Russia's Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. An analysis of the novel has unambiguously proved Sholokhov's authorship. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters.

The Sino-Soviet Conflict

In 1973, near the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Solzhenitsyn sent a ''Letter to the Soviet Leaders'' to a limited number of upper echelon Soviet officials. This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to

Vietnam war

Once in America, Solzhenitsyn urged the United States to continue its involvement in the Vietnam War.

In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (''A World Split Apart''), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He rhetorically asks if the American Anti-War Movement ever realized the effects their actions had on Vietnam: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"

During his time in the United States, Solzhenitsyn made several controversial public statements: notably, he accused Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg of treason.

Kosovo War

Solzhenitsyn strongly condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, saying "there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler."

The Holodomor

Solzhenitsyn has stated that the ongoing Ukrainian effort to have the 1930s famine, the Holodomor, recognized as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people is in fact historical revisionism. According to Solzhenitsyn, the famine was caused by the nature of the Communist regime, under which all peoples suffered. As such it was not an assault by the Russian people against the Ukrainian people, and the wish to represent it as such is only recent and politically motivated.

Solzhenitsyn's views on this matter are in line with those of several historians of the period (such as Dmitri Volkogonov and Aleksandr Bushkov) as well as the official stance of the Russian Government. This view suggests that policies of collectivization and mass seizure of property that lead to the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s were a result of the political (communist) and economic (favoring rapid industrial growth over consumption) policies of the Soviet Union, and not racial hatred against the Ukrainians.

Published works and speeches

''The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, edited by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, ISI Books (2009)

''A Storm in the Mountains''

''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' (1962; novella)

''An Incident at Krechetovka Station'' (1963; novella)

''Matryona's Place'' (1963; novella)

''For the Good of the Cause'' (1964; novella)

''The First Circle'' (1968; novel). Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle.

''Cancer Ward'' (1968; novel)

''The Love-Girl and the Innocent'' (1969; play), a.k.a. ''The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker'' or ''The Tenderfoot and the Tart''.

''Nobel Prize delivered speech (1970)The speech was delivered to the Swedish Academy in writing and not actually given as a lecture.

''August 1914'' (1971). The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR in an historical novel. The novel centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).

''The Gulag Archipelago'' (three volumes) (1973–1978), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union. Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle.

''Prussian Nights'' (Finished in 1951, first published in 1974; poetry)

''Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, 10 December 1974

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, ''A Letter to the Soviet leaders'', Collins: Harvill Press (1974), ISBN 0-06-013913-7

''The Oak and the Calf'' (1975)

''Lenin in Zürich'' (1976; separate publication of chapters on Lenin, none of them published before this point, from ''The Red Wheel''. They were later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded ''August 1914''.)

''Warning to the West'' (1976; 5 speeches (translated to English), 3 to the Americans in 1975 and 2 to the British in 1976)

''Harvard Commencement Address (1978) link

''The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America'' (1980)

''Pluralists'' (1983; political pamphlet)

''November 1916'' (1983; novel in ''The Red Wheel'' sequence)

''Victory Celebration'' (1983)

''Prisoners'' (1983)

''Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag. Templeton Prize Address, London, 10 May'' (1983)

''August 1914'' (1984; novel, much-expanded edition)

''Rebuilding Russia'' (1990)

''March 1917'' (1990)

''April 1917''

''The Russian Question'' (1995)

'' ''Russia under Avalanche'' (''Россия в обвале'',1998; political pamphlet) (Complete text in Russian:) ''Two Hundred Years Together'' (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.

TV documentaries on Solzhenitsyn

In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov shot TV documentary ''Besedy s Solzhenitsynym'' (''The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn'') of four parts for which Sokurov visited Solzhenitsyn’s home and talked to him about his life, creativity and Russian literature and history. On 12 December 2009, the Russian channel ''Rossiya K'' showed the French television documentary ''L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag'' made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title ''Taynaya Istoriya “Arkhipelaga GULAG”'' (''Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago''). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of ''The Gulag Archipelago''.

Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago (online in Russian)

See also

Alexander Dolgun

Alexander Galich

Mask of Sorrow

Lydia Chukovskaya

Harry Wu

Notes

References

Björkegren, Hans, and Kaarina Eneberg ''Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Biography'', Henley-on-Thames: Aiden Ellis, 1973. ISBN 0-85628-005-4.

Daprà Veronika: "A.I. Solzhenitsyn: The Political Writings". Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1991; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja

Ericson, Edward E. Jr. and Klimoff, Alexis, ''The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn'', ISI books, 2008.

Mahoney, Daniel J., ''Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology'', Rowman & Littlefield, 2001

Moody, Christopher. ''Solzhenitsyn''. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973. ISBN 0-05-002600-3

Nivat, Georges, ''Le phénomène Soljénitsyne'', Fayard, 2009

Pontuso, James F., ''Assault on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought'' 2nd ed. Lanham, Md. Lexington Books, 2004. ISBN 978-0-7391-0594-8

Scammell, Michael ''Solzhenitsyn: A Biography''. London: Paladin, 1986. ISBN 0-586-08538-6

Thomas, D.M.: ''Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life''. New York 1998, St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-18036-5

Victor A. Pogadaev. Solzhenitsyn: Tanpa Karyanya Sejarah Abad 20 Tak Terbayangkan – "Pentas", Jil. 3, Bil. 4 October-December 2008. Kuala Lumpur, hlm. pp. 60–63

Further reading

;Biographies

;Reference works

Edward J. Brown, "Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps," in his Russian Literature Since the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1982), pp. 251–291 Michael Lydon, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn," in his Real Writing: Word Models of the Modern World (New York: Patrick Press, 2001), pp. 183–251 Mahoney, "Solzhenitsyn on Russia's 'Jewish Question,'" Society (November–December 2002): 104–109 Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., "Solzhenitsyn," in his The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 279–340 Mary McCarthy, "The Tolstoy Connection," Saturday Review, 16 September 1972, pp. 79–96 Modern Fiction Studies, special Solzhenitsyn issue, 23 (Spring 1977) David Remnick, "The Exile Returns," New Yorker (14 February 1994): 64–83 Leona Toker, "The Gulag Archipelago" and "The Gulag Fiction of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," in her Return from the Archipelago: Narrative of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 101–121, 188–209

Dariusz Tolczyk, "A Sliver in the Throat of Power," in his See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven, Conn. & London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 253–310

Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A., 29 (1998) Urmanov, ed., "Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha" A. I. Solzhenitsyna: Khudozhestvennyi mir. Poetika. Kul'turnyi kontekst (Blagoveshchensk: BGPU, 2003) Zvezda, special Solzhenitsyn issue (June 1994)

External links

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970

The Nobel Prize Internet Archive's page on Solzhenitsyn

A World Split Apart: Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Commencement Address to the graduating class at Harvard University

* Audio and textual version of speech

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Saving the Nation Is the Utmost Priority for the State" ''Moscow News'' 2 May 2006

Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death' ''Der Spiegel'' 23 July 2007

Solzhenicyn.ru – most informative site about Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn's autobiography from his non-official site

The introduction to the Book Gulag by Anne Applebaum

Russian Memorial website to Human Rights victims

Solzhenitsyn: biography, photos, prose, interviews, critical essays

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Obituary and public tribute

The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Profile

Solzhenitsyn: Life in Cavendish Richard Svec, Town Manager of Cavendish, VT, speaks of Solzhenitsyn. Audio. 5 August 2008

The Leaders and the Dreamers – Russia Profile

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