Continuation of post titled On Deception, 2005.
Note: Excerpts of this bio were gleaned from his bio on the Nobel Prize website and his speech.
The author Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood destiny when his degree in mathematics saved him from death at an internment camp, was his source of livelihood while in exile, and his cover for being able to write.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested in East Prussia in 1945 while serving as commander of an artillery-position-finding company on the front lines of the war. The Office of Special Operations (OSO), the Special Committee of the NKVD, sentenced him to eight years in detention camp based on evidence that he wrote disrespectful remarks about Stalin in correspondence with a school friend during the years of 1944 to 45 and anti-government remarks in drafts of stories and notes that were found in a personal map case.
Solzhenitsyn served the first part of his sentence in several correctional work camps. But in 1946, because of his mathematical degree and skills, he was transferred to some scientific research institutes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of State Security. In 1950, however, he was transferred to "Special Prisons," which were filled with political prisoners. It was here that he would labor as a miner, bricklayer, and foundryman. After his eight-year sentence ended, the OSO exiled him for life to Kok-Terek in Kazakhstan.
In exile, he was cured of cancer after being admitted into a cancer clinic, he taught mathematics and physics, and he secretly wrote poetry and prose-at first, he had to memorize his poetry in order to remember it but he worked on and finished his first manuscript by hiding it under his mattress in his quarters.
In 1961, after hearing the author A. T. Tvardovsky’s speech to the 22nd Congress of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Solzhenitsyn decided to come out of the shadows as a writer and find a publisher for his manuscript One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The manuscript would find its way to Tvardovsky himself, who published it. Shortly after, the book was banned and all of Solzhenitsyn’s writings seized.
Solzhenitsyn was greatly discouraged, fearing he had brought his works out into the public eye too early and it would be to his ultimate ruin. But many of his manuscripts got into the hands of writers, translators, and publishers and were published in other countries. It is with this brotherhood of supporters and some of the world’s most prominent writers that protected him from further persecution and refuge in the even of him being placed in exile again.
Evidence of admiration for Solzhenitsyn can be seen in the plain fact that it was not his own country that nominated him for a Nobel Prize in 1970. His name was advanced by the French Nobel Prize Laureate (1952) Francois Mauriac and other colleagues.
Solzhenitsyn was not allowed to leave Russia to accept his Nobel Award in Literature but his acceptance speech was captured on film. Titled One Word of Truth, Solzhenitsyn uses his prison camp experience to introduce his thoughts on how humankind bears the responsibility of their own awareness of untruth, injustice, and repression and stopping it before it’s too powerful to quell.
"The world is overrun by the brazen conviction that force can do everything, while justice can do nothing," says the author. With governments and citizens subscribing to a double standard of justice-one for themselves and one for "the others," one for the rich and one for the poor, one for the powerful and one for the powerless-it becomes necessary for each of us to stand up and be counted. A Russian aphorism becomes the emblem of this message: "One word of truth outweighs the whole world."
Solzhenitsyn continues to believe that he was spared so that 1) he could write the stories that all of the other exiled writers were not able to print; and 2) represent the souls and voices of the millions of Russians killed by Stalin.
