Wakeup and Die

Aleksandr Solzenhenitsyn has died August 3, 2008 in Russia. I spent the day acknowledging my 47th birthday. I have not seen any comments from Barack Obama or John McCain. I read his book The Gulag Archpileago in the tenth grade in Dover High School. It was interesting that the Capitol School District made one also read The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck and Caesar Rodney High School gave 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell to task. In degree, what Solzenhnitsyn did no say in his life he can help indirectly by being dearly departed to add focus on the American School of The Perfect Dictator.

In the long run we're all dead.

Maynard Keanes

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn  Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, Russian pronunciation (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)  was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system, and for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. That year, he was elected as a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature. He was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a well-known conductor and pianist. He died at home after years of declining health on August 3, 2008.

During World War II, he served as the commander of an artillery unit in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, he was arrested for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend, N. D. Utkevich, about the conduct of the war by Josef Stalin, whom he called "the whiskered one", "Khozyain" (The Master) and "Balabos", (Odessa Yiddish for "boss").[11] He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, paragraph 10, and of "founding a hostile organisation" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police (NKGB) to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.

The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase," as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka, special scientific research facilities run by Ministry of State Security, where he met Lev Kopelev, paragon of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in the West in 1968. In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundryman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not then diagnosed.

From March 1953, Solzhenitsyn began a sentence of internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread, until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was cured. These experiences became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The right hand". It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has some interesting parallels to Dostoevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically-minded man in prison. He repented for what he did as a Red Army captain and in prison compared himself with the perpetrators of the Gulag ("I remember myself in my captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'") His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire").

During his years of exile, and following his reprieve and return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote, "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

Kazakhstan Krishna

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