The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 - 1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That next year, he married a mathematician that had a son from a prior marriage, named Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova. They remarried in 1957, after his exile ended, but divorced a second time in 1972. In 1952, only a year before he was released, they divorced because the wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of residence permits or work. They had just slightly more than a year of married life before he went into the army and then to the Gulag. On April 7, 1940, while at university, he married his first wife, named Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.

He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on Jfor sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counter-battery fire onto them, which resulted in their being destroyed.ĭuring his time serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, he was arrested by the SMERSH and then sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile because he criticized Josef Stalin in a private letter. At this time he was also taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History.ĭuring the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, got involved in some major action at the front, and was twice decorated.

He studied physics and mathematics at Rostov State University. This eventually led to the novel “August 1914”, with some of the chapters that he wrote still surviving. His educated mom, who never remarried, encouraged his scientific and literary learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith.īy as early as 1936, he began developing the concepts and characters for his planned epic work on the Russian Revolution and World War One. Later on, he recalled that his mom fought for survival and that they needed to keep his dad’s background in the old Imperial Army secret. By the year 1930 the family property was turned into a collective farm. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War.

His father was killed in a hunting accident just after her pregnancy was confirmed, so Aleksandr was raised by his aunt and widowed mom in lowly circumstances. His dad was of Russian and his mom, Taisiya Zakharovna, was of Ukranian descent. The Gulag Archipelago: Complete Edition (With: )Īleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RFSR (what is now Stavropol Krai, Russia) on Decemand was a Soviet and Russian novelist, historian, and dramatist. The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Centuryīetween Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978īetween Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994 Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals Shafarevich)Ī World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978 The Oak And The Calf: Sketches Of Literary Life In The Soviet Unionįrom Under the Rubble (With: Mikhail Agursky,Evgeny Barabanov,Vadim Borisov,F.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 - 1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn