Word: solzhenitsyns
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...countries cherish the good opinion of mankind. Russia is no exception. That is why the recent award of the Nobel Prize to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is as great a public embarrassment as Soviet leaders have felt since the awarding of the prize to Boris Pasternak in 1958. More tellingly than Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn bears witness to human degradation in the Soviet Union of the Stalin era. The world premiere of A Play by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater reveals the novelist to be a dramatist of feral power...
...play is set in a Stalinist "correctional" prison camp in 1945. It is a place Solzhenitsyn calls "the invisible nation," where "99 men weep and one man laughs." Most of the prisoners are "politicals" whose sentences run from ten to 25 years. Their crimes? "Failure to turn informer." Reading a poem unsanctioned by the regime. Writing a letter calling Stalin "the man with the moustache" and commenting ironically on how bad his Russian is-for which "crime" Solzhenitsyn himself spent eight years in Russian prisons. The prisoners' horizon is a gray-black wall. High up on the wall...
...condition that subsumes all isms. Nonetheless, it is a fierce rebuke to all those shallow-thinking fantasts who believed, early and late, that the Russian Revolution heralded a new dawn for mankind, as epitomized by Lincoln Steffens who said, "I have been over into the future and it works." Solzhenitsyn shows that life in the Soviet Union has been precisely the reverse. It is the mirror image of that abysmal past from which man has been trying to free himself for thousands of years: the enslavement of mind, body and soul...
Thus far into this terrible century no one has to itemize what happens in a prison camp. It all happens in this play. It is horrible, cruel, and heartrending. But beneath it all, there are two buoyancies. One is Solzhenitsyn's indestructible humanity. The other is that this is a game, the grimmest game men can play: survival. A Polish sausage, a woman's body, a bottle of vodka-these are the chips. At this gaming table, to lose...
Indispensable Tradition. The Swedish Academy cited Solzhenitsyn for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In a country where church, judiciary and other institutions have often proved unable to restrain the power of either czar or commissar, the writer has emerged as the last authoritative voice of conscience. Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn is aware of the power-and perils...