[NYTr] CubaNow: Solzhenitsyn and the Thaw
 
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:24:58 -0500 (CDT)


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
CubaNow - Jul 23, 2007
http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=6&item=3028&cont=show.php

Solzhenitsyn and the Thaw

By Lisandro Otero
English translation by Olga Rosa GonzC!lez.

Cubanow.- The relation with its intelligentsia was one of the problems
faced by the great empire the Soviet Union was. Due to rigid
regulations, absurd aesthetic theories and repressive measures many
artists were forced to limit their creativity. One of the most famous
cases in this sense was that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The most
important lesson of his work is that the human spirit never dies
despite the iniquities the physical matter might be exposed to. The
environment created by Stalin was used by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to
describe the horrors that characterizes his novelistic work. His
stories helped to attract the attention on the deviations of the
socialist laws and the aberrations of Stalinism.

But, he was not the unruly son all the time. He graduated from the
University of Rostock with excellent grades in mathematics and Marxism.
By the time WWII began, he went to fight and as an artillery captain he
won four medals for his actions in combat. In 1945, he was arrested for
having written a letter in which he criticized Stalin. He spent eight
years in prison and another three in exile. In 1956, he was allowed to
settle himself in Ryazan where he worked as a professor of mathematics.

Khrushchevbs opening-up policy was used by Solzhenitsyn to write about
his experiences in jail and in 1962 he sent a manuscript to magazine
Novy Mir which accept it immediately. bOne day in the life of Ivan
Denisovichb was a national and international best seller. Up to that
moment, nobody had dared to go that far. Khrushchev allowed the liberal
environment to favor its regime but those years did not last much.
KhrushchevB4s fall in 1964 brought about a return to the restrictive
practices against intellectuals. However, Solzhenitsyn kept writing
novels such as bThe First Circleb and bCancer Wardb which made him even
more famous. In 1970, he was awarded with the Nobel Prize but he
refused to go to Stockholm to receive it.

In 1973, Solzhenitsyn managed to get excerpts of his new novel
bArchipielago Gulagb about the network of prisons, concentration camps
and forced-labor camps created by Stalin from the police survelillance.
When it was published in The West it was an immediate best seller. Ten
million copies were sold in two years. In the coming years, his
prestige brought about the sale of 30 million copies of his books. In
1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union and went to live in
Germany. Later, he settled in the United States, in the state of
Vermont. In 1990, he got his citizenship back and in 1994 he returned
to Russia.

The ideological battle in the Soviet Russia was terrible. The dogma of
the socialist realism was never overcome. Painting was trapped in
brepresentation artb, abstract art was bdecadentb. Literature limited
itself to the use of report techniques to describe scenes of the rural
and proletarian life. The Bolsheviks did not understand the artistic
vanguard that developed itself as part of an authentic revolution.

The worsening of antagonisms with the intellectuals and artists in the
USSR marginalized them with a systematic distrust. A valuable talent
was wasted when it could have been incorporated in a positive way to
the creation of socialism. The imposition of an aesthetic-partybs
doctrine and censure, zdanovism and socialist realism brought about the
schematization and reduction of the cultural life.

We can not forget the Solzhenitsyn case was one of the propagandistic
instruments of the Cold War. It was used to create a campaign of
discredit against the Soviet Union. In the mechanisms of confrontation,
dissenting voices abroad were used as instruments of internal
destabilization. Some believe that the Nobel Prize awarded to him was a
well founded maneuver by the CIA. Therefore, Solzhenitzyn the writer, a
good writer even, must be seen apart from the maneuvers made by the
United States in its anti-Soviet crusade.

[The author is a writer, National Literature Prize winner and president
of the Cuban Academy of the Spanish Language.]

       
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