Solzhenitsyn remembered
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. In Belarus, his name has caused an ambiguous reception in the recent years. The man who played a pivotal role in collapsing the communism, Solzhenitsyn was a consistent supporter of Russia’s imperial foreign policy. At the same time, a writer is not just the sum of his political views.
Literary critic Piatro Vasyuchenka talks about the influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on our society, while former Gulag prisoner Mikola Paznyak narrates about Solzhenitsyn as a good supervisor in a labor camp. Nadzeya Dzemidovich, a member of the Union of Belarusian Youth, recalls Solzhenitsyn as a man who sponsored her book.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. After school, he enrolled for the physics and mathematics course at the University of Rostov-on Don. During the WWII, he served as a commander of artillery battalion. In 1945, he was arrested and sentence to eight years in labor camps for “anti-Soviet propaganda and plotting to create an anti-Soviet organization”. In 1962, the Novyi Mir (New World) magazine published his One Day of Ivan Denisovich. Based on his labor camp experience, the book made Solzhenitsyn world known.
These are just dry facts. But we are bringing you several human touches to Solzhenitsyn’s portrait. Nadzeya Dzemidovich who spent 12 years in Gulag for taking part in the underground Union of Belarusian Youth, recalls:
“I was in the Taishetsk camps and in Karaganda. He served in the other camps, so we did not serve our terms together. He wired me $200 for my book. Many former prisoners, including myself, were given $10 per day from the Solzhenitsyn Foundation. Later, those who spent more than 12 years were given $75-100 twice a year. I don’t remember the titles of his book very well apart from Gulag Archipelago. My memory is bad, because I was tortured with electrical shocks. But I remember the contents of his book and I will tell you that he wrote the truth about the Soviet rule”.
I found Mikalai Paznyak, 83 when he was packing in order to travel and attend the funeral of his former camp brigadier. Alexander Solzhenitsyn helped him survive from a death-row camp in Spaski. Here is Paznyak’s story:
“We met each other in Ekibastuz around 1950. I was sent from a death camp to Ekibastuz. They saw that I was not dying, so they transferred me to Kazakhstan. While there, I ended up in Nikitin’s brigade who liked beating up people. I fought during the WWII, so I told him that would suffocate him he continued to beat me with a stick. I grabbed his head and turned it, so he later had to walk with his head turned for three months. As a matter of revenge, he began assigning me for punishment works. But eventually I managed to get into Solzhenitsyn’s brigade. He was always police and working with him was better. It was a brigade of electricians. I was not an electrician, but he did not give me up. He asked one of his workers to teach me and he did so. I am now going to his funeral”.
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1974 after the first volume of his Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, the writer was expelled from the Soviet Union. He first lived in Switzerland and then moved to Vermont. In 1969-1988 he wrote eight-volume Red Circle. In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and lived permanently in Moscow by the time of his death.
Literary critic and writer Piatro Vasyuchenka: “Solzhenitsyn turned upside down the mass consciousness in the Soviet empire of which Belarus was a part. He actually had a very high respect for Vasil Bykov”.
ERB: Allegedly, Vasil Bykov signed a letter of Soviet writers against Solzhenitsyn.
Vasyuchenka: I have reports that the letter was signed contrary to Bykov’s consent. It was a common practice back then.
ERB: Solzhenitsyn turned the mass consciousness of a Soviet man, but propagated the view of a Russian imperialist in the recent years. Should we Belarusians resent him for that?
Vasyuchenka: “I wrote an article about Alexander Solzhenitsyn for the book titled “Great Writers in the 20th Century”. I wrote with respect to Alexander Isayevich but noted that I did not share his views expressed in the article titled “How Russia Should Be Built”. Those were the views of a man who shares the interests of a neighboring country. They can be understood but not accepted”.
Photo: Vesti
