Solzhenitsyn Research Articles

Комментарий в скобках как способ проявления авторской личности в мемуарной книге А. И. Солженицына «Бодался телёнок с дубом»

Комментарий в скобках как способ проявления авторской личности в мемуарной книге А. И. Солженицына «Бодался телёнок с дубом»

Солженицынская Швейцария

Солженицынская Швейцария

Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment

Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment Rhiannon Dowling (bio) Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag. 328 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300179415. $65.00. Jonathan Daly, Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. 258 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1474224369. $88.00. Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters, ed. and trans. Emily D. Johnson. 304 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300209310. $85.00. Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953–1964. 280 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1501702792. $45.00. Ever since I got into contact with you, I have been in a remarkably serene, tranquil, cheerful mood. I am more good-humored than I have ever been ... I pay absolutely no heed to all the surrounding trivialities and rubbish. Physically I now feel my condition is completely satisfactory: recently we had our latest quarterly medical inspection, and they found absolutely nothing wrong with my health (except for my heart, but whose heart is in good shape nowadays?) —Arsenii Formakov (1900–83) to his wife, 1 January 1945 (Gulag Letters, 87–88) Arsenii Formakov was most definitely lying. At least he was not telling the whole truth. When he finally got in touch with his wife, Anna, Formakov had been incarcerated for three and a half years. Most of this time he spent in the Kraslag labor camp in Krasnoiarsk krai, over 5,000 kilometers from where he [End Page 173] was arrested in his home of Daugavpils, Latvia. He was a prominent member of a community of Latvian Old Believers arrested for anti-Soviet activity after the Soviet army occupied and annexed Latvia in 1940. His correspondences with Anna and other close friends and family members from 1944–55 are translated and interpreted by Emily Johnson in the absorbing new volume Gulag Letters. In them, he boasted of the simple comforts he enjoyed in the camp, as well as the tremendous good fortune and privilege that insulated him from the horrors that Anna no doubt imagined he suffered as a forced laborer. He continued this way until his release in 1947. His actions, however, belied his cheerful words. When he was rearrested 19 months after release, he tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in his isolation cell. After his release from his second sentence in 1955 thanks to reforms that eliminated the most brutal camps and practices, his health never fully recovered, although he lived a long and full life. Both his religious faith and his relationship with Anna remained strong, and the two lived together until their deaths in 1983 and 1985 (9, 47, 89, 149, 261). Over half a century since the first stories from the Stalinist Gulag became available to readers worldwide, historians still disagree about how to comprehend this institution and how to use the testimonies of its victims. Memoir literature from writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling has made the most profound impressions on a wide range of readers, detailing depths of deprivation and inhumanity inflicted on prisoners by feckless guards, senseless regulations, and vicious fellow-prisoners.1 Since then, the fall of the Soviet Union has opened archives containing official records from the Soviet justice system and a flood of memoir literature has brought new survivors into the discussion.2 Historians have since drawn from both the official records and the testimonies of survivors to produce a more complex picture of the world of the Stalinist Gulag. In recent decades, [End Page 174] scholars like Oleg Khlevniuk, Galina Ivanova, and Anne Applebaum have used a variety of official documents and survivor literature to develop a broad overview of the Gulag system's functioning. They all emphasized the repressive and economic functions of the institution, portraying the Gulag as an integral part of Stalin's regime of societal control and echoing insights that Solzhenitsyn offered in his Gulag Archipelago.3 The picture of oppressive centralized control has been complicated by studies like those of Alan Barenberg and Steven...

Review

Review

Александар Солжењицин — беседа на Харварду

This paper examines the stylistics of the speech of the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University in 1978. The aim of the work is to use certain methods, such as analysis and synthesis, proof and refutation, to draw a conclusion about how and to what extent a well-constructed word, including logos, ethos and pathos, can impress the audience. Revealing the structure of the parts of the speech, taking into account its meaning and logical connections, we can conclude that Solzhenitsyn's speech was noticed, thanks to the unifying effect of the triad (speech, speaker, audience).

Франк в архиве Ф. Ницше: вы­ступление в Веймаре 1932 г.

The article reconstructs the general historical and philosophical background of the talk “Nietzsche and Russian thinkers related to him” (“Nietzsche und ihm verwandte rus­sische Geister”) given by S.L. Frank at the Nietzsche Archive on February 25, 1932. On the basis of the archival material from the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, the correspondence between Frank and Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Niet­zsche is analyzed and the list of guests invited to Frank’s lecture is examined. A special at­tention is dedicated to a general reconstruction of the life and creative path of Carl August Emge, one of the first German professors of philosophy who voluntarily joined the National Socialist Party in December 1931, but who, at the same time, was a friend of Frank’s and the organizer of his lecture at the Nietzsche Archive in 1932. The appendix also presents two pieces of archival material: Frank’s letter to Förster-Nietzsche dated February 18, 1932 (repository: Goethe and Schiller Archives; signature GSA 72/BW 1458); the response letter from Förster-Nietzsche from February 22, 1932 (repository: fourth inventory of S.L. Frank Papers at the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad); two incomplete German abstracts of Frank’s talk at the Nietzsche Archives and their translation into Russian (reposi­tory: 12th box of S.L. Frank Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archives).

КРЕСТЬЯНИН НА ВОЙНЕ И В СОВЕТСКОМ КОНЦЛАГЕРЕ (В РАЗМЫШЛЕНИЯХ В. БЫКОВА, А. СОЛЖЕНИЦЫНА, В. ШАЛАМОВА)

Peasants, like people from other social strata, in the war or in a soviet concentration camp for at least some time live with their past experiences, memories, habits and stereotyped behaviors. It also turns out that the past can be important aid in developing a heroic system of relations with the enemy or in the necessary patience for survival. Vasil Bykov writes about this in the story «The sign of trouble», and Andrey Platonov, for example, in the story «The officer and the peasant». But the past can and does determine the behavior of the peasant even when he cannot free himself from the painful and destructive things that his former life has left in him. And in this case, he betrays himself, his family and friends, including his own future, in the face of the enemy, turns out to be an enemy of his people and eventually dies a shameful death. Vasil Bykov wrote about it in his stories «Sotnikov» and «Crane cry». According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel «One day of Ivan Denisovich», the life of a peasant in a camp is simpler than that of people who are not adapted to hard work. Sometimes this life is even characterized by a kind of enthusiasm. But this kind of statement is not confirmed by Varlam Shalamov, who observes the rapid leveling of a person from any social group into a semi-human, a typical worn out prisoner. Who is right – Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov? Probably everyone has their own truth. But they agree with one thing – the rejection and curse of soviet totalitarianism.

Farewell to the Past Century?

The Russian authorities, supported by the representatives of the Russian cultural circles, celebrated 2018 as a year of harmonious reception of their literary traditions. Accordingly, the 100th anniversary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s birth was included into the series of commemorations and jubilees, minimizing, however, the problem of the Russian literature’s profound heterogeneity and inconsistency. Disregarding differences between literary currents, equalizing various, often contradictory intellectual phenomena can manifest that the Russian authorities search for a kind of cultural synthesis which will become a solid foundation of the Russianness in the XXI century. Nevertheless, their integrative ambitions are some how static or demobilizing. Moreover, these seem to be based on the conviction that cultural policy is not about determining and enhancing directions of further literary development but about assimilating and even restricting various artistic forces and traditions.

Ivan Bagriany — a painter of words and brush

Ivan Bagryany — a contender for the Nobel Prize, the author of the sensational novels “The Garden of Hetsimansky”, written about the Soviet camps long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the “Tigrolovs”, which was a real bestseller in the Western world and printed in many countries in millions of copies, is a unique multi-faceted figure in the history of not only Ukrainian, but also world culture. A writer, artist, politician, public figure, around whom forces of different convictions were grouped — this can be described as this person.Having received recognition abroad, he was not known in Ukraine for many years, and only almost thirty years after his death received real recognition at home: he was awarded the State Prize of Ukraine named after him. T. Shevchenko. A lot of popular science and monographic studies have been written about his literary work, which includes fiction and journalistic works, dissertations are protected. However, his artistic activity still remains “in the shadow”, the ways of becoming Bagryany as an artist have been little studied. To introduce works of Bagryany's fine art into his literary canvas, using original drawings from various funds, as well as a number of little-known materials, including the epistolary, is the purpose of this article.The sources of artistic talent Bagryany. His landscapes, portraits, illustrations for his own works, political satire are analyzed. The feature of the technique of drawings, graphic works and oil works of different genres is understood. The palette of verbal colors used in literary creation, in particular in poetry, is defined.

Поэтика рассказов Е. Замятина и А. Солженицына

Поэтика рассказов Е. Замятина и А. Солженицына

The Survival of Faith in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and “Matryona’s House”

Faith is a vital element in the works of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer who experienced the notorious Gulag and difficultly in a strongly atheistic country. However, faith is never a simplistic topic for Solzhenitsyn, especially writing in a time when religion was officially shoved aside from the public discourse. In the light of a set of views on religion inferred from Terry Eagleton’s essay, this paper aims to explain the anomalous religiosity as seen in the narrators of Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and short story “Matryona’s House.” According to the Eagleton’s model, there are three stages of religiosity, namely, 1) omission of religion’s otherworldly and pure ritualistic elements, 2) acceptance of mentally-empowering potentials of religion, and 3) internalization of the humanistic values of religion. The analysis concludes with a notion that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and “Matryona’s House” represent an evolution of faith that has gone through a period of challenge. On a sidenote, the analysis also confirms the dialogic nature of Solzhenitsyn’s works, in which one topic is presented through contradictory voices.

Revivifying socialist realism: Lukács’s Solschenizyn

In the wake of Stalin’s death and the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s early fictions, Georg Lukacs claimed to discern a revivification of socialist realism, the officially-sanctioned school of Soviet literature. A furtherance of that process was integral to the “renaissance of Marxism” and vitalization of socialist democracy that he hoped would restore the faith in socialism shaken by the Stalinist era. Although he dared not admit it, he envisioned a socialist realism cast in the image of bourgeois “critical realism.”

TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION RATES IN THE US STEEL INDUSTRY

ABSTRACT The adoption of new technology has several consequences ranging from sustaining the firm’’s competitiveness down to the tactical level of targeting marketing efforts to certain promising segments. In here, technology adoption models were surveyed and applied to real data in the search for a model that could describe the US steel industry. After 1974 the Open Hearth, Basic Oxygen Furnace, and the Electric Arc Furnace were the three competing technologies in the US steel industry. The simple logistic fit and the competitive Lotka-Volterra model were considered to describe the data. Model parameters for the logistic fit were obtained by the least squares method and a steepest descent search algorithm. The competitive Lotka-Volterra model was solved using a Runge-Kutta numerical integration after obtaining parameters with a linear regression. Neither of these two models was successful in describing the data. Therefore, a modified Lotka-Volterra model was developed to describe a system dynamics where all players compete for one finite resource. This model was very successful in predicting the production rates of steel by the Basic Oxygen Furnace, the Open Hearth, and the Electric Arc Furnace over the period of available data (1978 through 2017). Besides showing that the steel market dynamics in the US is not akin to the competition in biological systems as proposed by Volterra, the model correctly predicted the extinction of the OH technology in the US in 1991. Forecasts from the resource limited Lotka-Volterra predict that the Basic Oxygen Furnace technology should go extinct in the US in the year 2033, whereas EAF production shall accelerate. “There where there is no struggle against fate there shall you resurrect your soul.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Keywords Steel, industry dynamics, model, Lotka-Volterra, technology, adoption

Солженицын и Шаламов

The author of the article compares and analyses the two well-known writers who were the victims of Soviet system repressions in Stalin time and made that phenomenon the centerpiece of their creative work. So, this is about two writers of the 20th century – Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlaam Shalamov, whose personal relations evolved from the attempts of cooperation to open tough opposition. Analyzing their personal biographies, the prison-camp experience, the value system and the depth of immersing into the theme, the author investigates the differences in the world-view of the two writers and explains the diversion of their views.

Александр Солженицын глазами белорусской публицистики

For Byelorussian nationalists Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the symbol of struggle against Soviet regime. But his essay «Rebuilding Russia» changed the attitude to Solzhenitsyn. Byelorussian publicists started to see Solzhenitsyn as supporter of Russian imperial policy. Nevertheless, for Byelorussian nationalism anti-Soviet Solzhenitsyn was more important than Solzhenitsyn imperial views supporter.

Молчание и бездействие. Размышления о политической судьбе Александра Солженицына

In the article the author tries to analyze the fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as active political figure. The writer viewed himself as the person whose mission was not only to reveal to the Russian readers the truth about Bolshevism, its origin and tragic consequences but also to show Russia the way a better future. However, in 1983, on the eve of «perestroika», Solzhenitsyn resigned from any political comments and for seven year went into seclusion. The author of the article examines Solzhenitsyn’s social and political publications with the aim to figure out the reasons for his self-isolation that prevented him from influencing strongly the political processes in Russia.

Солженицын и страна. Оценка неприятия

lmost all estimates of the figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn are not related to literary criticism. Most studies evaluate his role, intentions and results. His figure is assessed in the context of the fate of the country, public perception and attitude to the country, which is Motherland for some, and mental and political enemy for the others. And for this purpose it is not even important who is right from the historical and political point of view. The point is who and how perceived the USSR and the entire Soviet project. Solzhenitsyn is seen as the enemy of the USSR and the Soviet project by those who popularized and helped him, and also according to his self-evaluation. Therefore, for those who identify themselves with the Soviet Union, its heritage and the entire Soviet project Solzhenitsyn represents the enemy and bearer of evil. For those who are hostile to the Soviet Union and the Soviet project, Solzhenitsyn is an ally in their struggle and bearer of good. Which of these parties is right is the issue of history and morality. 66% of Russian citizens support the first point of view, and the second point of view is supported by 25% of the population. Nowadays 88 % of Russian citizens know who Solzhenitsyn was. 31% consider him to be moral authority for them. 8% of the people believe that Solzhenitsyn presented true facts in his books.

Двенадцатый к «Письму одиннадцати» Солженицын и «Русская партия»: аспекты идеологического соседства

The article examines the attempts of some Western researchers to «whitewash» the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from «accusations» of Russian nationalism. These well-intentioned attempts aimed to prevent the exclusion of the Russian writer’s name from the consensual field of modern Western academic culture, may lead to serious distortion in the understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s work. One of the examples of such distortion is the idea of fundamental differences of the views of Solzhenitsyn and the members of the so-called «Russian Party» that formed in the 1960s-1970s around «Molodaya Guardiya» (Young Guard) magazine. On the basis of the episode described in Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs «The Oak and the Calf» when he did not support Tvardovsky’s «Novy Mir» magazine in its controversy against «Molodaya Gvardiya», the author analyzes the journalistic polemics around the articles «Inevitability» by Victor Chalmaev and «Enlightened Philistinism» by Mikhail Lobanov. After the publication of A.G. Dementiev’s critical article that was seen by many as Russophobic and ideologically adversive, and the firm answer to it known as «The Letter of the Eleven», these polemics resulted in the dismissal of «Novy Mir» editorial staff including Tvardovsky and then dismissal of A. Nikonov – the editor-in-chief of «Molodaya Gvardiya». The author of the article shows that in spite of Solzhenitsyn’s close relations with «Novy Mir» and his alienation with the circles associated with «Molodaya Gvardiya» magazine, he still was in agreement with the publicists of the «Russian Party» regarding most key issues of the ideological agenda of that time. This example of Solzhenitsyn’s «disloyalty» to «his» magazine can be viewed as the source of his later evolution as publicist and political thinker who systematically entered into the controversy with the Russophobia of liberal intelligentsia and defended the interests of Russian nation. In the concluding part of the article the author suggests that the relations of Solzhenitsyn with the «Russian Party» could be described as «ideologically adjacent» (similar to the literary adjacency of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, described by Lev Losev), and also reviews the reasons that determined the «no connection» of Solzhenitsyn with the Russian Party in spite of their intense ideological interaction.

Радикализм как выбор: случай А.И. Солженицына

The article is devoted to the study of the creative development of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a writer, thinker and politician. The author consistently analyzes the main fiction and publicistic works of the writer. The concept is based on the idea of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s political radicalism, which makes his work and ideology internally contradictory. Essentially the author of «The GULAG Archipelagо» simultaneously advocates and opposes Russia, proving himself to be patriot and anti-patriot at the same time. This refers both to his ideology and the characters of his works. Moreover, the said contradiction can manifest itself in the framework of one and the same work, even within one phrase. This explains the completely opposing assessments of the ideological and creative heritage of Solzhenitsyn, both in Russia and abroad. In his studies the author turns to the broad philosophical context of the phenomenon of Solzhenitsyn as radical.

Notes about Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin

Spanning over a decade from 1990 until 2003, the transcripts of interviews with Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin mostly deal with literary topics. I. Lisnyanskaya discusses her works and poetic methods and talks about her friends and acquaintances in the literary world. Featuring on these pages are 20th-century authors: Sergey Averintsev, Vasily Aksyonov, Bella Akhmadulina, Anna Akhmatova, Eduard Bagritsky, Andrey Bitov, Joseph Brodsky, Elena Bulgakova, Igor Vinogradov, Andrey Vosnesensky, Rasul Gamzatov, Lidia Ginsburg, Evgeny Evtushenko, Olga Ivinskaya, Yury Kublanovsky, Feliks Kuznetsov, Vladimir Maksimov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam, Yury Nagibin, Boris Pasternak, Maria Petrovykh, Evgeny Popov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arseny Tarkovsky, Korney Chukovsky, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, and Marina Tsvetaeva. I. Lisnyan skaya’s opinions are often biased and extremely subjective: they are interesting not despite, but because of it. Another important topic is the repercussions of publishing the Metropol almanac. The transcripts also help reconstruct the history of some of Lisyanskaya’s poems.