Ignat solzhenitsyn biography of michael

The other Solzhenitsyn

All concert pianists walk in the shadow of gods, but few are as darkly overhung as the 26-year-old Russian who will make his London début tonight. Keyboard deities - at least two of whom will be in attendance - are only a part of it; the expectations of Mstislav Rostropovich, who supervised his musical start, represent a more serious challenge. But this pianist also bears a unique burden, in that his father just happens to be one of the greatest political heroes of the century.

All concert pianists walk in the shadow of gods, but few are as darkly overhung as the 26-year-old Russian who will make his London début tonight. Keyboard deities - at least two of whom will be in attendance - are only a part of it; the expectations of Mstislav Rostropovich, who supervised his musical start, represent a more serious challenge. But this pianist also bears a unique burden, in that his father just happens to be one of the greatest political heroes of the century.

"When I began performing in public, I used to feel that the audience had come out of curiosity," says Ignat Solzhenitsyn. "And I suppose that curiosity will always be there. It's inevitable: it comes with the territory." To meet this boundingly eager young man, who apologises in a quintessentially American manner for smoking during the interview, is to banish all thoughts of Russian gloom. And when our talk threatens to get stuck on the doings of Alexander, Ignat politely but firmly wrenches it back on course: he's living his own life, pursuing his own career, and that should be our subject-matter today. But with a family that is so indissolubly linked in its singular destiny, it is no surprise that the father's tale should permeate the son's.

When I ask for the story of his musical life, Ignat Solzhenitsyn launches into what is clearly a well-worn routine. His parents always had music on and when he was six he began to experiment with the piano they had accidentally acquired with their

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Soviet-Russian author and dissident (1918–2008)

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His non-fiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.

Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, he initially lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist, and embraced Marxism–Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian.

As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He pursued writing novels about repression in the Soviet Union and his experiences. In 1962, he published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—an account of Stalinist repressions—with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. His last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage Solzhenitsyn from continuing to write. He continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1966, In the First Circle in 1968, August

Publishing Perspectives

By Daniel Kalder

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at aged 89 in August 2008, his reputation had been in flux for a long time. Even so, while most obituaries acknowledged the power and significance of The Gulag Archipelago and his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he was nevertheless dogged to the grave by accusations of anti-Semitism, reactionary nationalism, and even pro-Putinism. And while he may have won the Nobel Prize in 1970, at the time of his death, interest in his later works was low: Indeed, many of these books had not even been translated into English. To many, Solzhenitsyn was an anachronism — a man, a hero even, who had nevertheless outlived his time.

Solzhenitsyn circa 1970

This past October, Harper Perennial tentatively dipped a toe in the water to see if conditions were favorable for a Solzhenitsyn revival by publishing a radically revised version of his great novel In the First Circle. Originally published in English in 1968, In the First Circle is the story of four days in a sharashka, a special prison camp where the scientist-prisoners carry out top secret research on behalf of the Stalinist regime. From this narrow focus, Solzhenitsyn paints a detailed picture of Soviet society in the 1950s. Although the 1968 version was acclaimed as an instant classic, few people at the time knew that they were reading a butchered, politically neutered version of the original text, which had been reduced from 96 chapters to 87. Solzhenitsyn himself had carried out the edit in the hope that he could get his novel past the Soviet censors. He failed, and forever afterward considered the truncated book “ersatz.” Thus in a sense hardly any English speakers have read In the First Circle — even if they think they have.

The restored text has done reasonably well, but it has not set the literary world on fire. And yet what is really strange is how long it took this unexpurgated text to reach an English speaking au

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    • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Biography

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

    In 1924, after several years of increasingly hostile Bolshevik disturbances in Kislovodsk, Taissia and the young Solzhenitsyn moved to Rostov-on-Don. His mother worked as a stenographer and they lived in part of a reconstructed stable without adequate heat and little money for food. After he graduated high school in 1936, Solzhenitsyn attended Rostov University on a Stalin Scholarship, an exclusive and political honor. Although he studied mathematics and physics, writing took up the majority of his time. Despite many submissions to publishers, none of his early works was published. Solzhenitsyn met his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, at Rostov University.

    She was a chemistry student and as passionate about music as Solzhenitsyn was about literature. They married in 1940 and became teachers in the small town of Morozovsk. In October 1941, Solzhenitsyn was called to war; he was 22 and would not return home for 15 years. His first military assignment was as a horse and cart driver, a humiliating experience he would later write about in The First Circle. Eventually he was transferred to artillery and recorded his experiences in a journal and letters to his wife and friends. In 1943, he was appointed commander of an “instrumental reconnaissance battery” and wa