Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: life, ideas and books

Life

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in 1918 and served as an artillery officer in the Red Army in the Second World War. In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private letters and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, followed by internal exile. After the Khrushchev thaw he was released, and his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, appeared in 1962.

He was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1969 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. After the publication of The Gulag Archipelago he was stripped of citizenship and deported in 1974. He lived in Switzerland and then in Vermont from 1976, regained Russian citizenship in 1990 and returned to Russia in 1994. He died near Moscow in 2008.

Ideas

Solzhenitsyn's writing documented political repression in the Soviet Union and argued that the camps were a product of ideology rather than an accident. His own experience in prison led him to Orthodox Christianity, and he came to see the struggle as a moral and spiritual one. He favoured traditional Russian culture and a strong presidential republic balanced by local self-government.

He criticised the West too, arguing that materialism and the loss of a sense of duty weakened free societies, although he admired Western political liberty.

Major works

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).
• Cancer Ward (1966) and The First Circle (1968).
• August 1914 (1971).
• The Gulag Archipelago (1973).
• The Red Wheel, a cycle on the Russian Revolution.

Why conservatives read him

The Gulag Archipelago is a central text in the case against communism and has sold tens of millions of copies. Conservatives read him as a witness to the moral cost of utopian ideology and for his reflections on conscience, faith and the dangers of a society without transcendent standards. His Russian nationalism and religious views have also drawn criticism, and historians have questioned some of the methods in his history.