On August 3, 2008, Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer who had been in the vortex of controversy for almost a lifetime and was known as the "conscience" of Russia, died of illness at home, completing his 89-year life.
Solzhenitsyn's life was indeed a life of ill-fatedness. He went to war, made military achievements, squatted in prison; was reformed through labor, exiled, and expelled are all unique labels on him.
However, he also rose to the pinnacle of writerhood and received widespread praise from the Russian public. It is incomprehensible that such a complex life experience should appear in Solzhenitsyn alone.
In 1918, Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of artillery officers in Russia. As an adult, Solzhenitsyn also followed in the footsteps of his father and embarked on a military journey.
Probably because of his bloodline genes, Solzhenitsyn fought bravely on the front-line battlefield and was soon promoted to captain company commander. If nothing else, Solzhenitsyn's life would have been glorious, but change took place, and Solzhenitsyn became embroiled in political struggles on the way to war and was sentenced to eight years of labor camp.
Eight years of imprisonment precipitated Solzhenitsyn's thoughts, and he seemed to have changed into a man. It can be said that life in gulag prison permanently changed the trajectory of Solzhenitsyn's life, determined his literary genre, the theme of his works, and even changed his way of thinking and personality characteristics.
In fact, Solzhenitsyn became famous during the Khrushchev period. The emergence of the "secret report" of the Khrushchev era set a large number of political prisoners freed Solzhenitsyn as one of them. Upon his release, Solzhenitsyn was inspired to publish the first Soviet work depicting Stalin-era labor camps in 1962. Immediately after its publication, the work caused a huge sensation, and Solzhenitsyn was also appreciated by Khrushchev himself.
However, with the downfall of Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn was also in a creative dilemma.
In 1967, in protest against censorship, Solzhenitsyn published an open letter at the Fourth Congress of the USSR in which he criticized the Soviet government's censorship system of newspapers and periodicals and demanded that the government abolish all overt and covert censorship of literary and artistic works. Of course, the arms could not twist the thighs, and Solzhenitsyn also suffered a reaction from the authorities.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Association, and his works were banned from publication in the Soviet Union. Faced with this situation, Solzhenitsyn simply raised the banner of the "dissident" movement and openly challenged the Soviet government.
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "pursuing the moral power of Russian literature." This made him even more intolerant of Soviet society. In early 1975, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for "inappropriate speech" and then deported, thus beginning a life of wandering for nearly two decades.
Solzhenitsyn initially spent two years in Europe, and when he set foot in the American town of Cavendish in 1976, he lived for eighteen years. Although Solzhenitsyn was grateful to his Western neighbors at the beginning of his stay, believing that they spared no effort to accept themselves when they fell, Solzhenitsyn was always unforgettable.
For the entire Western world, however, Solzhenitsyn was soon disappointed.
The Western world rejoiced at Solzhenitsyn's arrival, but this euphoria was merely a pretense. All they needed was Solzhenitsyn's fame and the title of "anti-Soviet fighter." At that time, Solzhenitsyn was the benchmark and banner of the right-wing liberal intellectuals in the Soviet Union, and the Western world needed to reveal the so-called "tyranny" of the Soviet Union by creating the image of Solzhenitsyn, so as to show respect for Solzhenitsyn at every turn.
Fame and fortune are certainly pleasant, but Solzhenitsyn is not another writer after all, he has a keen sense of politics.
In 1978, Solzhenitsyn gave a public lecture at Harvard University, in which he fiercely criticized the utilitarian and vulgar values of Western society, while arguing that Western democracy was inherently unsuitable for Russian society. Since then, Solzhenitsyn has suffered a collective rejection from Western intellectuals, who believe that Solzhenitsyn has gone mad and cannot be measured by common sense. Even Kissinger persuaded President Ford to ignore Solzhenitsyn so as not to touch the sensitive nerves of the Soviets.
After that, Solzhenitsyn lived in seclusion in the small town of Vermont until his return in 1994.
In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland as a traitor or an exile, dragging his 76-year-old tired body. Seeing the devastation and the extreme poverty of the people, Solzhenitsyn was silent, and his heart began to repent of the "immature" thoughts of the past, believing that he had "harmed the Russian motherland".
Solzhenitsyn called himself an "anti-Soviet fighter" all his life, but in his twilight years, he suddenly found that the once powerful motherland had long been destroyed, and this huge gap between ideals and reality was really contradictory!