Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”
Only a person who has experienced the quagmire multiplicity of pains can vent out his misery, couched in the façade of philosophy, in this way. One of the greatest Russian authors who held a prominent image in world literature, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn makes a character from his novel, The Cancer ward, preach this line.
Solzhenitsyn had seen suffering at close quarters. He had smelled the filth of the Russian labour camps called Gulag, he had tasted the thick, cold blows of the batons; He had felt the sharp, draining numbness of existence in the camp; He has maintained a desperate effort to keep his mental stability during inhuman conditions.
Under the dictatorial regime of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda when in February 1945, while serving in east Prussia he was arrested for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend about the conduct of the World war II by Stalin. In the letter he referred to him as “the whiskered one”, “Khozyain”(the master) and “Balabos”, which meant the same. Solzhenitsyn was serving the Soviet union as the commander of an acoustic recognizance unit in the Red Army. He was sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp to be followed by permanent internal exile. During his term in the prison he tried to broaden his intellectual horizon through the Joycean virtues of “silence, cunning and exile” This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time. Any person who posed as a threat to Stalin’s autocratic rule was arrested and put into the labour camps called Gulags. There were 176 separate camp complexes each comprising hundreds, even thousands of camps. Approximately there were 7 million prisoners in the gulag under Stalin’s rule. People were imprisoned in a gulag camp for committing crimes such as unexcused absence from work, petty thefts, anti-government jokes and so on. The treatments meted out to the prisoners were not only brutal and cruel but intolerable too. They were forced to do work which was mainly of a hard, physical nature. The conditions were unbearable and the gulag camps had high mortality rates among the prisoners. Life of the people after jail was also a bane as they were denied jobs and were forbidden to settle in cities. Thus, the gulag was a kind of a hell for the soviet dwellers.
A moral and spiritual leader, Alexsandr stirred the minds and the deepest emotions of the readers in his times and his works still carry the magic to posterity. A profound thinker and a deep humanist, Alexsandr translated the horrors of the inhuman conditions and the brutal treatment towards the prisoners in most of his works. One of his most famous works is One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich which portrayed the oppression of the gulag army men towards the prisoners and strongly criticised the sadistic intentions of Stalin and the horrors of camp survival. A man suffering from cancer, he poured out his feelings and his helplessness into words in The Cancer Ward. The novel, makes many allegorical references to the state of Soviet Russia, in particular the quote from Kostoglotov "A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?" highlights the comparison between cancer overtaking the patient with the police state overtaking Russia. The First circle was also a document of the evils and the oppression in the gulag. The title is an allusion to Dante’s first circle of hell in The Divine Comedy. The Gulag Archipelago was a three volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 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.
Solzhenitsyn did not question his state ideology before spending time in the camp. But after the stint he suffered a jolt to his beliefs and strongly opposed the Soviet government. In the 1917 publication, The Red Wheel he warned the world against the dangers of communist aggression. Even in his last works-Rebuilding Russia (’90) and Russia in collapse (’98) he criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy and held it responsible for the dismay that the country was passing through. He also held a strong, critical view of the West in bringing out the evils of Soviet Communism. He was of the opinion that the west suffered spiritual weakness and there was nobody to look clearly at it. He also blamed the west to be a victim of vulgar materialism and strongly condemned its attack on Vietnam. But his biased and lopsided approach was not without any inexplicable views. 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 never asked himself, why Marxism in other European countries led not to the Gulag but welfare states. His knowledge of the Russian history was very superficial and laced with romantic sentimentalism. Instead of blaming the Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels arguing that Marxism itself is violent. He strained the conclusion that Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced.
Through his works one can gauge each drop of blood that has moulded itself to the vibrant and breathing words which fumes towards the oppressors. A man bombarded with experience and overflowing with articulations, no holds barred, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a prophet not only of his times but of the succeeding generation also.