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synthesis of religious conviction, scientific
knowledge, and mystical experience in a system
he called “godmanhood.” In 1880 he received a
doctoral degree based on the successful defense
of his dissertation “Critique of Abstract Princi-
ples.” A highly promising academic career was
cut short in April 1881, when the authorities
prevented him from lecturing after Soloviev
issued an appeal for them to spare the lives of
those convicted of assassinating Czar ALEXANDER
II . Soloviev now was free to actively pursue his
goal of reconciling the various Christian
churches, a theme that he most forcefully artic-
ulated in his book Russia and the Universal Church
(1889). In it, Soloviev called for the union of
Catholic and Orthodox churches in a universal
theocracy under the joint leadership of the
Roman pope and the Russian czar. He traveled
to Paris to raise support for this, but his ideas
found little resonance among French Catholics.
Soloviev was more influential at home, where
he developed a following among religious
philosophers and the poets of the early-20th-
century Symbolist movement. His last work was
the controversial Three Conversations on War,
Progress, and the End of History (1899), where he
presented a more apocalyptic rendering of his
idea of a universal theocracy. He died in August
1900, while visiting the estate of the prominent
Trubetskoi family.
a degree in mathematics, but he also pursued
his budding interest in literature through corre-
spondence courses from Moscow State Univer-
sity. He fought with distinction during World
War II, rising to the rank of artillery captain, but
in 1945 he was arrested for writing critically
about Joseph STALIN in a letter to a friend. He
spent the next eight years in the prisons and
labor camps of the GULAG that would provide
the source material for his most powerful nov-
els. In 1953 he was released from the labor
camps but sentenced to an additional three-year
term in internal exile in Kazakhstan. Finally
free in 1956, he settled in the central Russian
town of Ryazan and worked as a mathematics
teacher. He achieved instant recognition in the
world of Soviet letters after the submission of
his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso-
vich, a powerful description of a typical day in a
Soviet labor camp, which drew from Solzhenit-
syn's own experiences. Published in 1962, the
book was approved for publication through the
intervention of General Secretary Nikita KHRUSH -
CHEV , who was in the middle of a political cam-
paign of de-Stalinization. The growing cultural
conservatism that followed Khrushchev's over-
throw in 1964 contributed to the increasingly
hostile official reception that Solzhenitsyn's sub-
sequent works, which were now published
through the Soviet literary underground known
as samizdat, received. In novels such as The First
Circle (1968) and The Cancer Ward, (1968) he
continued to probe the nature and personal
consequences of the system of political repres-
sion created under Stalin, topics that were cen-
tral to his early work. For this body of work,
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize
in literature, but aware of his own government's
growing displeasure with his work and fearing
that he would not be allowed to return to the
Soviet Union, he did not travel to Sweden to
receive the prize. His conflict with the Soviet
authorities came to a head in 1973 when he
authorized the publication in Paris of a copy of
the manuscript recently seized by the KGB in
Moscow. Published as The Gulag Archipelago, the
novel attempted what Solzhenitsyn described as
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich
(1918-
)
writer
One of the giants of 20th-century Russian liter-
ature, Solzhenitsyn is perhaps best known for
his searing re-creation of the world of the
enforced labor camps of the Soviet Union, pub-
lished as The Gulag Archipelago, for which he
received the Nobel Prize in literature. Solzhenit-
syn was born in the town of Kislovodsk on the
northern side of the Caucasus to a family of
Cossack background. He never knew his father,
who died shortly before his birth, and was
raised by his mother. Solzhenitsyn graduated
from the state university at Rostov-on-Don with
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