1. 20 TH CENTURY LITERATURE ALEKSANDR ISAYEVICH SOLZHENITSYN

2. 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008 Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism.

3. OVERVIEW OF LIFE AND WORKS He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system. While his writings were long suppressed in the USSR, he wrote many books, most notably The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

4. VIDEO: GREAT WRITERS: ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN 1998 1974

5. ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

6. MAJOR THEMES Resilience of the human spirit Trust between individuals and their leaders and peers Personal pride or dignity Overcoming prejudices based on ethnic and cultural differences for the good of the group Evil created by institutions

7. PRE-READING ACTIVITIES US News Article: due by the end of class Friday, 1/23 Well-written responses Textual Evidence from article Typed or handwritten Journals : due Monday, 1/26 Expectations 10-15 sentences per response Typed or handwritten

9. IMPRISONMENT In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labor camp. (This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.)

10. IMPRISONMENT (CONT’D) 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 (i.e., a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security) 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 foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing.

11. IMPRISONMENT In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in the northeastern region of Kazakhstan, very close to the current border with Russia, as was common for political prisoners. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag