Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Impact On Society

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows how Soviet prisoners, known as Zeks, are treated while being in the gulag for one day through the eyes of the protagonist and omniscient narrator named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Despite being in an environment such as the Soviet Union, where there is harsh tundra and not much food to eat, Shukhov tries to make good use of what he has received while trying to keep himself alive. The purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of food is to show its overall significance and that it is used as a means of trade and survival. Over time, the power of food reveals its significance to the Zeks and especially to Shukhov and food allows both groups understanding towards the necessity of food for their vitality and well-being additionally.

According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian novelist, born on December 11, 1918. From an early age, Solzhenitsyn was interested in becoming a writer, and began sending his writings for publication. He received a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostv-na-Donu but had to put his career aside due to World War II. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrest for letters he wrote that criticized Joseph Stalin. This led to him spending eight years in prison and labor camps. Following these events, Solzhenitsyn went on to publish numerous novels: Odin den iz zhizni Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), V kruge pervom (The First Circle) Rakovy korpus (Cancer Ward) and Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago). The Gulag Archipelago discusses Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in labor camps and the way the system worked. This led to Solzhenitsyn being brought to court for treason. These works received critical acclaim and he was bestowed with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. In his quote, Solzhenitsyn is saying that human beings are always having internal fights with themselves over good and evil. They always try to overcome one or the other, with most cases being humans try to drive the evil away. No matter how hard human beings try to turn it away, it isn’t possible; humans are inherently evil.

Soviet Ukraine was a terrible place to be in the late 1900s for Jewish people. There was strong anti-semitism during this time in the waning days of the Cold War. The Cold War was a state of political hostility between countries that was characterized mainly by threats and propaganda. Lev Golinkin wrote on his experiences about being a Jew living in Ukraine in his memoir, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka. Golinkin possesses an interesting writing style that includes a terribly harsh tone of fear, yet he also incorporates humor that forces the reader to connect with him. Golinkin utilized tone superbly to allow the reader to better understand the topics of his memoir.

“In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win!” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident, espoused this philosophy to the Swedish Academy. He spoke of the power of art in combating the tyranny and lies of a corrupt government, and as a medium for evaluating society. He was at various times, a soldier in the Soviet army, a political prisoner of the Soviet state, a celebrity for his literary works, and an exile from all of Russia. His fiery philippic against Stalin landed him in prison for eight years; his account of prison life made him immensely popular during the de-Stalinization years of the early 1960’s, and he was deported for his most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago. He has become a symbol of the

Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin in the real world and he was really important during these events. Joseph Stalin is the one who had the most impact on these series of events that happened. Stalin was a very important man in the world either for good things he did or bad things he did, but he is still very famous and popular for what he has left behind. He was really important because he helped rebel against Nicholas II and made a lot of good things happen to the Russian Empire. Stalin industrialized the nation. He made it sufficiently solid to survive a Fascist attack. He likewise figured out how to make the war a partnership between the West and the Soviet Union. This implied that post-war, numerous thoughts the West had imparted to Fascism were tossed out. These are good things he did, but it only gets worse because Stalin did 21 million times more bad than good. He tricked, lied, killed, manipulated, and threatened many of his people. There are many where that came from including the Holodomor and the Great Purge. Stalin has done many things to the Russian Empire and will be remembered as a world leader either for good or bad. Joseph Stalin was born in a confused life meaning that his parents didn’t know what to do with his future. His mom wanted him to be a priest while his dad wanted him to become a cobbler. Once his mother persuaded his father to make him a priest, his father got divorced and left. At this time Joseph knew that he didn’t want to become anything that

Gulag Voices by Anne Applebaum is a collection of stories of people who lived in the Gulag camp system because the NKVD arrested them for political crimes. All of the stories in this novel describe different situations the prisoners endured. Some female prisoners were raped while the male prisoners were sent to concentration camps to support the soviet industry by mining, cutting trees for lumber, or working in factories. This novel gives real background into how the camp system changed their lives and stayed with them forever. Gulag Voices shows the prisoners coped emotionally, psychologically, and physically with being in the camp system. The stories from this novel also show why some of the prisoners were arrested and what the crimes they

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his impactful narrative that paints a picture of the Gulag labor camps in Soviet Russia through personal experience, eyewitness testimony and interviews, and primary research material. Solzhenitsyn is describing the silence that survivors of the Gulag were forced to exhibit after staring terror and fear directly in the face during their time in the Gulag. The silence Solzhenitsyn is describing, is claimed to be one of the reason the Gulag is often not given the attention in history books and in the forefront of our minds that the Gulag deserves. The Gulag is believed to be one of the most horrible and inhuman acts of the 20th century, yet western society tends to shy away from mentioning the Gulag when discussing tragedy. This paper will examine historians’ views on the Gulag and why it has been overlooked in history as the horrible tragedy it was and the impact that this silence has had, not only on the survivors, but also the impact it has had on Russia and its society as a whole.

Solzhenitsyn envisioned and captured the persona of the Soviet prison labor camp system by describing as a chain of hidden islands amongst the USSR landscape. Solzhenitsyn sees himself lifting the shroud that the Soviet regime tried to hide the gulags behind by telling his story of his time in the gulags. Reading his book gave the reader the sense of reading a forbidden text, something surrounded in secrecy. Solzhenitsyn develops themes throughout the book. These fetid and morbid “islands” would see millions of unfortunate visitors forced to slave away at one of the world’s largest and fastest infrastructure and industrialization builds in the history of mankind perpetuated by the will of Stalin and his secret police the NKVD. In this beautifully and treacherously written story, Alexander Solzhenitsyn goes from his glory filled days as a distinguished officer to just an exhausted instrument of the Soviet state.

Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, dives into what it would be like to be a political prisoner in Russia during Stalin’s time in power. The story is divided into four parts: First Hearing, Second Hearing, Third Hearing, and Grammatical Fiction. The subject of the book is given a look at by examining the story of Nicholas Rubashov, an older revolutionary and member of the Old Army, who is imprisoned and accused of crimes that he didn’t commit. To begin the First Hearing, Rubashov is arrested and put in solitary.

The simple fact that the entire novel is based on just one day in the camp just depicts the immense struggle for the prisoners. The loss of time itself is a major punishment for the prisoners. Solzhenitsyn’s handling of time through this novel is truly

Finally, Solzhenitsyn's novel expresses one of the most important Christian principles, hope for the future. In Christianity, since Christ paid the price for the sins of the world, there are no lost causes. Christians have faith that Christ will return someday and that there will be a heaven. In the same way, in the midst of the terrible conditions of the prison camp, Shukhov can be pleased at

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn first published in November 1962, the author writes about the life of Ivan, he explains one day of the life of a prisoner in a Gulag. In a way Ivan represents Aleksandr, as this author went through this too. The author experienced the Gulag system from 1945 to 1953; at this time Joseph Stalin was in repression and was in charge of this ''work camps''. Aleksandr enters in the mind of Ivan and declares his feelings through oppression and stress in this cruel and monotony work camp.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a widely acclaimed Russian author and is known by some to be one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the Golden Age of Russian literature (Lauer). Dostoevsky’s works frequently contain complex psychological themes reflecting the merciless inhumanity of the Russian Empire during the nineteenth century. Due to the presence of acute realism and integrity in these works, Dostoevsky’s deep perceptiveness of the world and ability to create nuanced yet unified works of fiction are highly respected by numerous distinguished psychologists, including Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, and notable Russian novelists of his time (Snodgrass). In perhaps one of the most remarkable of Dostoevsky's works, namely Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky explores the “far-ranging moral, religious, psychological, social, political, and artistic ramifications of the breakdown of traditional structures of authority and belief” within Russia that he had experienced first-hand during his lifetime (Heims). The preeminent belief, or concept, showcased by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment is redemption through suffering; classically defined as a process by which one experiences voluntary suffering, whether it be through the medium of a problem or pain, for the benefit of oneself or others. Dostoevsky’s exceptionally human characters within Crime and Punishment all encounter the colossal and perplexing issue of suffering as a result of their life choices up until that point