Brief biography of Alexander Isaakievich Solzhenitsyn.

Alexander Isaakievich Solzhenitsyn is an essayist-publicist, a famous world writer, playwright, poet and Soviet politician with dissident views.

As an outspoken opponent of communism, he created cult works that conveyed to the people the socio-political flaws of social equality. As a historian-philologist of the highest degree, Solzhenitsyn is widely known for his publications on the formation and development of Russia in the 19th-20th centuries.

Childhood and youth of Alexander Isaakievich.

On December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Taisiya Zakharovna Solzhenitsyna (nee Shcherbak) gave birth to a boy who was named Sasha. Six months before the birth of her son, the young mother was widowed - the father of the future writer tragically died while hunting.

Taisiya Zakharovna, Alexander’s mother, comes from a Kuban family of landowners. The writer's father, Isaac Semenovich, came from North Caucasian peasants. They met in Moscow, where a young Ukrainian woman, Taisiya, came to study, and the brave junior officer of the Grenadier Artillery Brigade, Isaac, received a two-week vacation to visit his classmates.

The revolutionary events of 1917 and the subsequent civil war (until 1922) ruined the Shcherbak-Solzhenitsyn family. In 1924 they moved to Rostov-on-Don, where Sasha studied at a local school. It was the educational period that discovered his writing talent - in the period 1929-1934 he created his first poems and essays. From the age of 9, little Sasha firmly decided to become a writer.

Having finished school with excellent marks in 1936, Alexander entered Rostov State University to study physics and mathematics. In 1939, Solzhenitsyn was still studying at the correspondence department of the literary faculty of the Moscow Institute. He did not have time to receive a literary education; the war began.

Brief biography of Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. His father, Isaac Semenovich, was a simple peasant. He died tragically while hunting before his son was born.

As a result, little Sasha was raised only by his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna. Due to complete ruin, during the October Revolution, they lived in extreme poverty.

Childhood and youth

Conflicts with the new Soviet government began for Solzhenitsyn as soon as he went to school. Since he was instilled with a love of religion from childhood, the boy wore a cross on his chest and flatly refused to become a pioneer.

Naturally, such “antics” entailed serious consequences. However, children's piety soon disappeared somewhere. Serious changes have occurred in Solzhenitsyn's biography.

Communist propaganda successfully influenced Alexander's worldview. He changed his beliefs and accepted the party's policies.

Later, of his own free will, he joined the ranks of the Komsomol members. As a teenager, Solzhenitsyn became seriously interested in reading world classics. Even then he dreamed of writing a book about revolutionary events.

However, when the time came to choose a profession, he decided to enter the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov State University.

For some reason, it seemed to the young man that mathematicians were the truly intelligent people, among whom he himself wanted to be.

Solzhenitsyn's studies were easy, so he graduated from the university with honors. While still a student, he was very interested in theatrical art. An interesting fact in Solzhenitsyn’s biography is that at one time he seriously wanted to connect his life with the theater.

Suddenly, World War II began and the young man had to go defend his homeland. But due to health problems, they refused to accept him for service as an ordinary soldier.

Then Alexander decided to complete officer courses in order to definitely go to the front. He managed to achieve his goal, as a result of which he ended up in an artillery regiment with the rank of lieutenant.

Solzhenitsyn showed himself to be a good warrior and was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War.

Conflict with authorities.

In February 1953, the writer served exile in Kazakhstan and treated metastases in Tashkent.
In 1956, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated for “lack of evidence of a crime.” In 1967, the KGB seized Solzhenitsyn's archive and banned publication.
In response, Alexander Isaakievich sends a letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers about the inadmissibility of censorship and persecution by the authorities. During the liberalization period of 1968, this paper shook up the entire foreign elite, and the Soviet authorities looked at him as an enemy of the people.

Under the powerful patronage of influential delegates, from the pen of the master comes the continuation of the cult bestseller “The Gulag Archipelago,” a story about the life of people in colonies and exile settlements.
1968 - foreign samizdat publishes “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle”, the book of the novel about exiled prisoners “An Experience in Artistic Research” is almost completed. In 1974 , after the resonant release of the first volume, the KGB confiscated the manuscripts as propaganda, and the author himself was deported from Russia.
He is forced to travel around the CIS countries in search of fresh creative ideas without the right to visit his homeland.

The works of Alexander Isaakievich Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn's writing activity belongs to the “post-Soviet return” - literature that is available to the ordinary reader after the abolition of censorship.

His works are characterized by the following features:

1. The author’s formed worldview and personal experience include participation in the Great Patriotic War, life in camps, exile in Siberia, forced emigration from his native country.
2. Harsh criticism of the totalitarianism of the USSR.
3. Thematic polemics of Stalinism.

1948-53 - national fame comes to the writer after the publication of “The New World” with his works.

1. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1961) is a description of the life of a peasant imprisoned in the Gulag.
2. “Matrenin’s Dvor” (1963) is an objective look at the heroine’s life as a holy great martyr.

The main characters of the essays are ordinary people, depicted as spiritual connoisseurs of shrines, exploring the world order of universal human values. The works caused a public outcry, and the first letters from grateful readers were from former Gulag prisoners. It was precisely the sharp separation of Solzhenitsyn’s work by civic courage from the literature of that time that founded the “GULAG Archipelago”.

History of youth

The writer's birthplace is Kislovodsk , where he was born in 1918. The boy lived in a single-parent family, and only his mother was involved in his upbringing, because his father, who went through the entire First World War to Berlin and received several awards, was killed while hunting. Taisiya Zakharovna invested all her resources and strength into the child, although their situation was very sad. After the revolution and due to the unstable economic situation in the country, the family went bankrupt and lived in extreme poverty. To improve her situation, Taisiya Zakharovna and her child moved to Rostov-on-Don, because the situation there was not so precarious.

The boy’s mother was very religious, so love for God was nurtured in him from early childhood and did not leave him until adolescence. It was because of this that little Sasha’s first problems with the new government began: the boy refused to take off his cross and join the ranks of the pioneers.

With the advent of adolescence, the worldview changed noticeably, which was facilitated by the influence of school education and its ideology, which was actively imposed on students. The young man had a particular passion for classical literature, avidly read all the books that could be obtained at that time and even dreamed of writing his own work of a revolutionary nature.

However, oddly enough, when Solzhenitsyn has to choose an educational institution to enroll in, he gives preference to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. Mainly, this choice was made because the young man believed that the most educated and capable people were entering mathematical fields, and he really wanted to see himself among them. Alexander Isaevich graduated from a higher educational institution with honors and became one of the best graduates of that year.

After his passion for the exact sciences, Solzhenitsyn was drawn to theatrical art . He wanted to enter drama school, but his attempts were in vain. However, he did not despair and decided to try himself in the literary field, becoming one of the students of the literary department at Moscow University. Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn was not destined to finish it due to the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. They wanted to draft him as a private, however, this was impossible due to health problems.

But for Alexander Isaevich, who was an ardent patriot, it was not a problem to gain the right to study at military courses, and after that he ended up in an artillery regiment with the rank of lieutenant. For his exploits, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Red Star, as well as the Order of the Patriotic War.

Personal life of Solzhenitsyn.

There were two loves in the life of Alexander Isaakievich. In 1940, he married Natalya Reshetovskaya, a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Rostov. Later, in memory of her famous husband, she will write memoirs - “In a Dispute with Time” (1975), “Excommunication” (1994) and the book “In the Second Circle: Revelation of Solzhenitsyn’s First Wife” (2006).

In the summer of 1968, Solzhenitsyn met MSU graduate student Natalya Svetlova, who quickly became his secretary and good friend. Watching their romance from the side, Reshetovskaya tries to poison herself, but is saved. 1972 - Solzhenitsyn struggles to get a divorce.

From his marriage to Svetlova, the writer has three children who inherited their father’s literary talent.

Personal life

Natalya Reshetovskaya became the first wife of the famous writer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn met her while studying at the university in 1936. They officially married in 1940. However, as fate would have it, they could not be together for long. The war and the arrest of Solzhenitsyn took away the happiness of the couple. Natalya decided to divorce Alexander due to repeated convictions by the NKVD. Despite this, the couple began to live together again in Ryazan, and then re-signed when Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated.

In 1968, Alexander Isaevich met Natalya Svetlova on his way, who worked in the laboratory of mathematical statistics. Soon they began an affair. Reshetova, having learned about Alexander’s affair with Natalya, tried to take her own life, but the doctors arrived in time to help. A few years later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn obtained a divorce. In the image of Natalya Svetlova, the writer found not only a wife, but also an assistant in public affairs. The marriage produced three beautiful sons.

Interesting facts about the writer:

In the biography of the outstanding historian A.I. Solzhenitsyn has many interesting facts.

• due to health reasons, the writer was considered limited in mobilization, but managed to be sent to the front line, where he was awarded the Order for courage;
• Alexander Isaakievich carefully took notes on military events, which was prohibited at that time;
• the reason for the writer’s arrest was his personal ideas sent to friends on paper;
• after three years of living in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn learns about a fictitious divorce from his first wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, after a while they marry again;
• after his release a year later he was rehabilitated (1956);
• after exile, Solzhenitsyn works as a teacher in the village;
• Alexander publishes his first stories under the patronage of N.S. Khrushchev;
• in December 2014, his museum was opened in Kislovodsk.

The work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn is imbued with anger for the mistakes of the Stalinist party. The freedom-loving writer based his works on the moral potential of the revolutionary ideas of that time.

Publication history

Solzhenitsyn did not dare to sign the manuscript sent to the editorial office of Novy Mir with his own name. There was almost no hope that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would see the light of day. Long tedious months had passed since one of the writer’s friends sent several sheets of paper covered in small handwriting to the employees of the country’s main literary publishing house, when suddenly an invitation arrived from Tvardovsky.

The author of “Vasily Terkin” and part-time editor-in-chief of the magazine “New World” read the manuscript of an unknown author thanks to Anna Berzer. An employee of the publishing house invited Tvardovsky to read the story, uttering a phrase that became decisive: “It’s about camp life, through the eyes of a simple man.” The great Soviet poet, the author of a military-patriotic poem, came from a simple peasant family. Therefore, the work, in which the narration is told from the perspective of a “simple man,” interested him very much.