Buddenbrooks

The Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck



As regular blogistas will know the Celtic Sage’s favourite German City, particularly at this time of year with the Weihnachtsmärkte, is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck, a UNESCO World Heritage site and in the 13th Century the capital of the remarkable Hanseatic League and the world’s richest city at that time. One of its favourite sons is the author Thomas Mann who won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature (One of 3 Nobel Laureates’ from Lübeck in the 20th Century, the others being Gunter Grass and Willy Brandt) principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous short stories. Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 at the age of 25. The German subtitle “Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie”, The Decline of a Family gives a clue to the book’s narrative.


Thomas Mann

His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between business and artist's worlds, respectively, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere. The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandising is a central topic.



There will be renewed interest in Buddenbrooks due to a new movie which Warner Brothers are releasing in German and which is filmed on location in Lübeck unlike previous versions, one of which was filmed in Gdansk. It also uses the Mann’s own house in Lübeck which is today the museum dedicated to Thomas, Heinreich and Klaus Mann called Buddenbrook Haus. Armin Mueller-Stahl and Iris Berben head the cast of a 2008 version to be released in December.



The main scene of action of Thomas Mann's Nobel Prize winning novel "Buddenbrooks" is Lübeck. Although the name of the "mediocre trading centre on the Baltic Sea" is never mentioned in the novel, there is not one street, square or place in this novel's city that does not allow itself to be identified in Lübeck. The house at Mengstraße 4 is at the heart of this novel. Exactly on this floor and behind these very windows where the Mann family lived in the middle of the 19th century there is an exhibit about a fictitious family that sits- as described by Thomas Mann - opposite St. Mary's Church in a "landscape room" and a "dining room" with white figures of gods and goddesses.



Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomised the situation of the German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician), continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return.



But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1940 and, from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich, where he died in 1955.



He never accomplished anything which could be compared to the stature attained by his most celebrated book, which was deeply ingrained with the German bourgeois way of life of his time. Some people say that is a kind of autobiographic novel, where many of the aspects of Thomas Mann's social surroundings and family life were portrayed in the book, with an accuracy and sharpness of a genius, who lived life surrounded by all kinds of problems one could imagine (homosexuality, drugs, family disputes on genius primacy) but who, at the other hand, was, in his own ways, deeply affected by bourgeois values and family affection. When the book was written Mann had only 25 years, which adds content to some theories that mathematical and other type of geniuses minds are in their prime when one reaches 30 years of age, thus explaining the exclamation of Sir Bertrand Russell that achieved fame long after he hit his intellectual prime.




Among the chief works of Mann's later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935) [ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960).


Thomas Mann 1937

In his biographical note provided to the Nobel Committee in 1929 Thomas Mann describes his early life and childhood in Lübeck;

“I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.



I was designated to take over my father's grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instil in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.

When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.

After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father's. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.”


Buddenbrookhaus

His former home, now designated Buddenbrookhaus, is worth a visit both to see a restored (and after wartime bombing, reconstructed) 19th Century merchant’s house and for the permanent exhibitions on the Mann family. Both new permanent exhibitions "The Manns - a literary family" and "Buddenbrooks - Novel of the Century" are at the centre complemented by further literary experiences and literary and cultural events. Sometimes reality follows fiction. The house with the white Baroque facade has of course never been the home of the Buddenbrooks, as they were a product of Thomas Mann's literary imagination. Nevertheless, the building is known by their name today. This might be absolutely justified, since the fictitious Buddenbrook family had more than a few characteristics in common with the Manns. And the Manns really did live here - Thomas Mann described the place of his youth in his novel “Buddenbrooks”.



Today, the house is nothing but a stylish piece of scenery. The original mansion of 1758 which contained all the rooms as described in the famous book was destroyed by RAF bombs and only the facade remains. A new building was erected behind it in 1957, and a permanent exhibition on the work of Thomas and Heinrich Mann is displayed here. A number of rooms have also been decorated according to the novel.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy.

Hopefully the movie will be released before too long in English so a wider audience can appreciate Buddenbrooks and the medieval gem which is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck.

See the trailer (in German) for the movie on this link;

http://www.buddenbrooks-derfilm.de

See; Lübeck; Queen of the Hansa

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/08/lbeck-queen-of-hansa.html


Thomas Mann Grave - Zürich

Buddenbrooks

The Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck



As regular blogistas will know the Celtic Sage’s favourite German City, particularly at this time of year with the Weihnachtsmärkte, is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck, a UNESCO World Heritage site and in the 13th Century the capital of the remarkable Hanseatic League and the world’s richest city at that time. One of its favourite sons is the author Thomas Mann who won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature (One of 3 Nobel Laureates’ from Lübeck in the 20th Century, the others being Gunter Grass and Willy Brandt) principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous short stories. Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 at the age of 25. The German subtitle “Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie”, The Decline of a Family gives a clue to the book’s narrative.


Thomas Mann

His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between business and artist's worlds, respectively, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere. The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandising is a central topic.



There will be renewed interest in Buddenbrooks due to a new movie which Warner Brothers are releasing in German and which is filmed on location in Lübeck unlike previous versions, one of which was filmed in Gdansk. It also uses the Mann’s own house in Lübeck which is today the museum dedicated to Thomas, Heinreich and Klaus Mann called Buddenbrook Haus. Armin Mueller-Stahl and Iris Berben head the cast of a 2008 version to be released in December.



The main scene of action of Thomas Mann's Nobel Prize winning novel "Buddenbrooks" is Lübeck. Although the name of the "mediocre trading centre on the Baltic Sea" is never mentioned in the novel, there is not one street, square or place in this novel's city that does not allow itself to be identified in Lübeck. The house at Mengstraße 4 is at the heart of this novel. Exactly on this floor and behind these very windows where the Mann family lived in the middle of the 19th century there is an exhibit about a fictitious family that sits- as described by Thomas Mann - opposite St. Mary's Church in a "landscape room" and a "dining room" with white figures of gods and goddesses.



Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomised the situation of the German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician), continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return.



But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1940 and, from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich, where he died in 1955.



He never accomplished anything which could be compared to the stature attained by his most celebrated book, which was deeply ingrained with the German bourgeois way of life of his time. Some people say that is a kind of autobiographic novel, where many of the aspects of Thomas Mann's social surroundings and family life were portrayed in the book, with an accuracy and sharpness of a genius, who lived life surrounded by all kinds of problems one could imagine (homosexuality, drugs, family disputes on genius primacy) but who, at the other hand, was, in his own ways, deeply affected by bourgeois values and family affection. When the book was written Mann had only 25 years, which adds content to some theories that mathematical and other type of geniuses minds are in their prime when one reaches 30 years of age, thus explaining the exclamation of Sir Bertrand Russell that achieved fame long after he hit his intellectual prime.




Among the chief works of Mann's later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935) [ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960).


Thomas Mann 1937

In his biographical note provided to the Nobel Committee in 1929 Thomas Mann describes his early life and childhood in Lübeck;

“I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.



I was designated to take over my father's grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instil in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.

When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.

After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father's. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.”


Buddenbrookhaus

His former home, now designated Buddenbrookhaus, is worth a visit both to see a restored (and after wartime bombing, reconstructed) 19th Century merchant’s house and for the permanent exhibitions on the Mann family. Both new permanent exhibitions "The Manns - a literary family" and "Buddenbrooks - Novel of the Century" are at the centre complemented by further literary experiences and literary and cultural events. Sometimes reality follows fiction. The house with the white Baroque facade has of course never been the home of the Buddenbrooks, as they were a product of Thomas Mann's literary imagination. Nevertheless, the building is known by their name today. This might be absolutely justified, since the fictitious Buddenbrook family had more than a few characteristics in common with the Manns. And the Manns really did live here - Thomas Mann described the place of his youth in his novel “Buddenbrooks”.



Today, the house is nothing but a stylish piece of scenery. The original mansion of 1758 which contained all the rooms as described in the famous book was destroyed by RAF bombs and only the facade remains. A new building was erected behind it in 1957, and a permanent exhibition on the work of Thomas and Heinrich Mann is displayed here. A number of rooms have also been decorated according to the novel.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy.

Hopefully the movie will be released before too long in English so a wider audience can appreciate Buddenbrooks and the medieval gem which is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck.

See the trailer (in German) for the movie on this link;

http://www.buddenbrooks-derfilm.de

See; Lübeck; Queen of the Hansa

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/08/lbeck-queen-of-hansa.html


Thomas Mann Grave - Zürich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In the times of the Soviet Union the archetype of the ideal citizen was characterised as “Soviet Man”, men like the coal miner Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov whose allegedly prodigious output was used as the basis of productivity to launch Stalin’s first 5 Year Plan. Hindsight shows us that Soviet Man was a feature of the propaganda machine rather than a reality and the Soviet Union was not the most productive of society’s but did produce impressive dodgy statistics. One true Soviet Man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn born on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution, a brilliant academic who fought bravely for his country in the “Great Patriotic War” and found himself condemned to a labour camp for a harmless remark about “Uncle Joe.” His searing exposure of the inhumanity of the Soviet system destroyed the moral force of communism and reiterated and revealed a universal truth of all totalitarian systems; that inhumanity dehumanises not just the victims of the system but even more so, the perpetrators of the inhumanity.

Russia is in mourning today (4 July 2008) for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate whose writing helped conquer the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn, 89, suffered heart failure at his home outside Moscow last night. His wife, Natalya, said today: "He was working all day yesterday, as usual. He did not suffer for long. He just became ill in the evening when he had already gone to bed. He wanted to die at home, and he has died at home. He wanted to die in summer, and he has died in summer. He lived a difficult but happy life. And he and I were happy."

Solzhenitsyn's death robs Russia of a hero whose stature was unequalled. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, described him today as a man of "unique destiny, whose name will remain". At a momentous time in Russian history Solzhenitsyn's quiet and courageous revolt against the evils of Josef Stalin's labour camps became an unshakeable force for change. His books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago revealed for the first time the horrors of the camps where ordinary Soviet citizens lived and died in unimaginable conditions of hardship and cruelty. Often, their crimes were no more than mild offences against the dictates and ideology of the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn after release from the Gulag in 1953

Solzhenitsyn was such a victim. He was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk. World War I had ended disastrously for Tsarist Russia and the nation plunged into civil war between Whites and Reds. Solzhenitsyn's family was white but his father died in a hunting accident before he was born. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and was persecuted by the newly installed Soviet regime. She was denied permanent employment and labouring alone, her family was forced into poverty from most of the 1920s and 30s. After earning degrees in philology, mathematics, and physics at Rostov University, Solzhenitsyn began teaching in 1941, aged 22 and seemed set for a brilliant academic career. That same year Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn enlisted and rose to the rank of artillery captain. He was decorated twice for bravery but this counted for little when, as the war was ending, he wrote a letter to an old friend in which he referred to the Soviet dictator Stalin as "the man with the moustache". This was considered an act of gross disrespect and he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. The Soviets who condemned him to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan could hardly have known it was a move that would contribute to the destruction of their system. Solzhenitsyn began to write, chronicling the minutiae of the camp inmates' suffering and the "crimes" for which they had been sentenced. His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a camp to which he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and it created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book - which became a major film starring Tom Courtenay - was lauded not only for its bravery, but for the quality of its unsparing prose.

The opening paragraph begins bleakly as it intends to continue;

“The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering.

The jangling stopped. Outside, it was still as dark as when Shukhov had gotten up in the night to use the latrine bucket — pitch-black, except for three yellow lights visible from the window, two in the perimeter, one inside the camp. “

And it continues in the same vein, similar to James Joyce’s prose of “meticulous meanness.” The Soviet system was stripped of ideological baggage and reduced to the systems casual and uncaring callousness and one man’s attempt to cope with its inhumanity and survive one more day. Nothing needed to be added and with the raw power, honesty and sparseness of Solzhenitsyn’s narrative it was not possible to take anything away.

Soviet prisoners on the way to the Gulag

When Khrushchev was removed, in 1964, the KGB re-asserted its control and reintroduced many of Stalin's measures against so-called thought-crime. Solzhenitsyn was again persecuted. His next book, The First Circle, was about inmates in a special camp for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential. Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps.

The novel Cancer Ward, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life: in this case, his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumour and dies - how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"

Solzhenitsyn's work gained power from the fact that no one was spared his anger. He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign. "Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs - and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades - and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people - and they believed it?"

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, and prisoner. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a move described by Soviet leaders as provocative. He was banned from travelling to receive his prize, but he wrote an acceptance speech in which he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth can conquer the world.

Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Boll in exile in 1974

And so it seemed when his work gained currency not only in the West, but inside Russia. Underground copies of his books circulated widely among students and contributed greatly to the dissident movement-than sprang up in the early Seventies. He was perceived as an enemy within and in 1974 he was stripped of his citizenship and exiled on charges of treason. Solzhenitsyn went first to Germany and then to the US, where he settled in a dacha-style compound in Vermont, surrounded by birch and pine forests. He yearned to return to his homeland and although his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev in 1990, he refused to go back until the last vestiges of the Soviet regime had been removed. In 1994, he made a triumphant return, marked in a 56-day train journey from Russia's Far East to Moscow.

But if supporters of Western-style democracy believed they were owed a share in Solzhenitsyn's triumph, they were wrong. His vision was not a simplistic view of a struggle between communism and capitalism, in which capitalism was the just victor. He believed Russia to be a civilisation unique to itself, where no known system - including Western democracy - could properly work. While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before".

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming him for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO and his fostering of the new Russian billionaires, "oligarchs" such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.

When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honour, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted. Solzhenitsyn also criticised Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on the oligarchs. But then the two men drew together in a move that some perceived as a contradiction. Putin, after all, was a veteran of the same KGB apparatus that had victimised Solzhenitsyn. But the author saw in Putin something more vital to Russia's future, a concept of nationalism and unique destiny. More the pity then that Putin did not read his observation that in the camps of the Gulag that the Chechen’s would die rather than submit.

It was a matter of sadness to many of Solzhenitsyn's admirers that as Putin closed newspapers and tightened the state's grip on free speech and enterprise; the great writer appeared to endorse Putin's vision of a separate political and cultural destiny for Russia. In his final TV interview last year, Solzhenitsyn made clear that Western democracy was not the solution to Russia's ills, and he expressed solidarity with Putin for reviving the country's standing.

"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," he said. "But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism ... As far as the state, the public mind and the economy are concerned, and Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."

Yet Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and that time has now passed. For many young Russians he is a distant, historical figure but in his time he was a clarion voice crying out for the rights of humanity against tyranny and it is arguable that his efforts and those of Andrei Sakharov destroyed the central moral claim of communism that its purpose was to create conditions for human happiness and fulfilment.


From the beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder". His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person - Solzhenitsyn himself - survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

His later years left his admirers in the West confused but his efforts in asserting the primacy of our humanity and defining Russian identity will endure long after his bones have been consigned to the earth of Mother Russia. The bravery of one man in refusing to accept his fate in the “meat grinder” led to a nation and the occupied peoples of the Iron Curtain also refusing to accept their fate. For reminding us of our common humanity this Nobel Laureate achieved a great deal and by removing the moral rationale from a system which claimed to be justified by moral purpose he changed the world. His moral righteousness will resonate forever where humans are crushed by “meat grinders”, be they in Tibet, Guantanamo, British interment camps in Ireland in the 70's, the CIA Gulag or the 5,600 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel.

South African writer and fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee today described Solzhenitsyn as “a man of immense personal courage, and, as a writer, the one indisputable heir of Tolstoy."

But his message and great polemic gift is perhaps best summed up by a character in the Gulag Archipelago, who observes; “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart”.

Never has the soul and earth of his beloved Mother Russia claimed a greater patriot. Rest in well earned peace, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In the times of the Soviet Union the archetype of the ideal citizen was characterised as “Soviet Man”, men like the coal miner Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov whose allegedly prodigious output was used as the basis of productivity to launch Stalin’s first 5 Year Plan. Hindsight shows us that Soviet Man was a feature of the propaganda machine rather than a reality and the Soviet Union was not the most productive of society’s but did produce impressive dodgy statistics. One true Soviet Man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn born on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution, a brilliant academic who fought bravely for his country in the “Great Patriotic War” and found himself condemned to a labour camp for a harmless remark about “Uncle Joe.” His searing exposure of the inhumanity of the Soviet system destroyed the moral force of communism and reiterated and revealed a universal truth of all totalitarian systems; that inhumanity dehumanises not just the victims of the system but even more so, the perpetrators of the inhumanity.

Russia is in mourning today (4 July 2008) for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate whose writing helped conquer the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn, 89, suffered heart failure at his home outside Moscow last night. His wife, Natalya, said today: "He was working all day yesterday, as usual. He did not suffer for long. He just became ill in the evening when he had already gone to bed. He wanted to die at home, and he has died at home. He wanted to die in summer, and he has died in summer. He lived a difficult but happy life. And he and I were happy."

Solzhenitsyn's death robs Russia of a hero whose stature was unequalled. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, described him today as a man of "unique destiny, whose name will remain". At a momentous time in Russian history Solzhenitsyn's quiet and courageous revolt against the evils of Josef Stalin's labour camps became an unshakeable force for change. His books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago revealed for the first time the horrors of the camps where ordinary Soviet citizens lived and died in unimaginable conditions of hardship and cruelty. Often, their crimes were no more than mild offences against the dictates and ideology of the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn after release from the Gulag in 1953

Solzhenitsyn was such a victim. He was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk. World War I had ended disastrously for Tsarist Russia and the nation plunged into civil war between Whites and Reds. Solzhenitsyn's family was white but his father died in a hunting accident before he was born. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and was persecuted by the newly installed Soviet regime. She was denied permanent employment and labouring alone, her family was forced into poverty from most of the 1920s and 30s. After earning degrees in philology, mathematics, and physics at Rostov University, Solzhenitsyn began teaching in 1941, aged 22 and seemed set for a brilliant academic career. That same year Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn enlisted and rose to the rank of artillery captain. He was decorated twice for bravery but this counted for little when, as the war was ending, he wrote a letter to an old friend in which he referred to the Soviet dictator Stalin as "the man with the moustache". This was considered an act of gross disrespect and he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. The Soviets who condemned him to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan could hardly have known it was a move that would contribute to the destruction of their system. Solzhenitsyn began to write, chronicling the minutiae of the camp inmates' suffering and the "crimes" for which they had been sentenced. His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a camp to which he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and it created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book - which became a major film starring Tom Courtenay - was lauded not only for its bravery, but for the quality of its unsparing prose.

The opening paragraph begins bleakly as it intends to continue;

“The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering.

The jangling stopped. Outside, it was still as dark as when Shukhov had gotten up in the night to use the latrine bucket — pitch-black, except for three yellow lights visible from the window, two in the perimeter, one inside the camp. “

And it continues in the same vein, similar to James Joyce’s prose of “meticulous meanness.” The Soviet system was stripped of ideological baggage and reduced to the systems casual and uncaring callousness and one man’s attempt to cope with its inhumanity and survive one more day. Nothing needed to be added and with the raw power, honesty and sparseness of Solzhenitsyn’s narrative it was not possible to take anything away.

Soviet prisoners on the way to the Gulag

When Khrushchev was removed, in 1964, the KGB re-asserted its control and reintroduced many of Stalin's measures against so-called thought-crime. Solzhenitsyn was again persecuted. His next book, The First Circle, was about inmates in a special camp for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential. Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps.

The novel Cancer Ward, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life: in this case, his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumour and dies - how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"

Solzhenitsyn's work gained power from the fact that no one was spared his anger. He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign. "Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs - and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades - and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people - and they believed it?"

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, and prisoner. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a move described by Soviet leaders as provocative. He was banned from travelling to receive his prize, but he wrote an acceptance speech in which he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth can conquer the world.

Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Boll in exile in 1974

And so it seemed when his work gained currency not only in the West, but inside Russia. Underground copies of his books circulated widely among students and contributed greatly to the dissident movement-than sprang up in the early Seventies. He was perceived as an enemy within and in 1974 he was stripped of his citizenship and exiled on charges of treason. Solzhenitsyn went first to Germany and then to the US, where he settled in a dacha-style compound in Vermont, surrounded by birch and pine forests. He yearned to return to his homeland and although his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev in 1990, he refused to go back until the last vestiges of the Soviet regime had been removed. In 1994, he made a triumphant return, marked in a 56-day train journey from Russia's Far East to Moscow.

But if supporters of Western-style democracy believed they were owed a share in Solzhenitsyn's triumph, they were wrong. His vision was not a simplistic view of a struggle between communism and capitalism, in which capitalism was the just victor. He believed Russia to be a civilisation unique to itself, where no known system - including Western democracy - could properly work. While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before".

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming him for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO and his fostering of the new Russian billionaires, "oligarchs" such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.

When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honour, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted. Solzhenitsyn also criticised Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on the oligarchs. But then the two men drew together in a move that some perceived as a contradiction. Putin, after all, was a veteran of the same KGB apparatus that had victimised Solzhenitsyn. But the author saw in Putin something more vital to Russia's future, a concept of nationalism and unique destiny. More the pity then that Putin did not read his observation that in the camps of the Gulag that the Chechen’s would die rather than submit.

It was a matter of sadness to many of Solzhenitsyn's admirers that as Putin closed newspapers and tightened the state's grip on free speech and enterprise; the great writer appeared to endorse Putin's vision of a separate political and cultural destiny for Russia. In his final TV interview last year, Solzhenitsyn made clear that Western democracy was not the solution to Russia's ills, and he expressed solidarity with Putin for reviving the country's standing.

"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," he said. "But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism ... As far as the state, the public mind and the economy are concerned, and Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."

Yet Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and that time has now passed. For many young Russians he is a distant, historical figure but in his time he was a clarion voice crying out for the rights of humanity against tyranny and it is arguable that his efforts and those of Andrei Sakharov destroyed the central moral claim of communism that its purpose was to create conditions for human happiness and fulfilment.


From the beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder". His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person - Solzhenitsyn himself - survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

His later years left his admirers in the West confused but his efforts in asserting the primacy of our humanity and defining Russian identity will endure long after his bones have been consigned to the earth of Mother Russia. The bravery of one man in refusing to accept his fate in the “meat grinder” led to a nation and the occupied peoples of the Iron Curtain also refusing to accept their fate. For reminding us of our common humanity this Nobel Laureate achieved a great deal and by removing the moral rationale from a system which claimed to be justified by moral purpose he changed the world. His moral righteousness will resonate forever where humans are crushed by “meat grinders”, be they in Tibet, Guantanamo, British interment camps in Ireland in the 70's, the CIA Gulag or the 5,600 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel.

South African writer and fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee today described Solzhenitsyn as “a man of immense personal courage, and, as a writer, the one indisputable heir of Tolstoy."

But his message and great polemic gift is perhaps best summed up by a character in the Gulag Archipelago, who observes; “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart”.

Never has the soul and earth of his beloved Mother Russia claimed a greater patriot. Rest in well earned peace, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn