On , Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn ascended to the podium at Harvard University and delivered a commencement address that was the perfect antithesis of political correctness. Being ...
Solzhenitsyn also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn said both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother (his father was killed in an accident before his birth).
A sympathetic overview of Solzhenitsyn’s life and writing, with a strong grounding in philosophical content, though overstating “anti-Western” strains in Solzhenitsyn’s thought.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 was awarded to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature"
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of treason, striped of his citizenship and deported from the Soviet Union after the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago, a firsthand account of the Soviet prison system. Solzhenitsyn and his family eventually settled in Vermont.
Solzhenitsyn had been criticized by some who considered him a racist and anti-Semite; according to their claims, he frequently made connections between the activities of Jews, Georgians, and Latvians and the causes of the mishaps that befell Russia in the twentieth century.
Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army's march across East Prussia, and focuses on the traumatic acts of rape and murder that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.