Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist and historian



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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist and historian. During the Second World War Solzhenitsyn joined the Red Army and rose to the rank of artillery captain and was decorated for bravery. While serving on the German front in 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a letter to a friend. Solzhenitsyn was found guilty and sent to a Soviet Labor Camp in Kazakhstan. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a labor camp, was initially banned but after the intervention of Nikita Khrushchev, it was published in 1962. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 but was not allowed to collect it in Stockholm.and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 following the publication of his reminiscences, The Gulag Archipelago (1973). This led to his arrest and after being charged with treason, stripped of his citizenship, and was deported from the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn, who collected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974, went to live in Vermont in the USA. He returned to Russia in 1994.

First Cell, First Love

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1973
How is one to take the title of this chapter? A cell and love in the same breath?...

You sit down and half-close your eyes and try to remember them all. How many different cells you were imprisoned in during your term! It is difficult to count them. And in each one of them were people, people. There might be two people in one, 150 in another. You were imprisoned for five minutes in one and all summer in another.

But in every case, out of all the cells you’ve been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate …Yes, in those days they were your only family.

What you experience in your first interrogation cell parallels nothing in your entire previous life or your whole subsequent life …



Maybe it was a terrible place for a human being. A lice-ridden, bug-infested lock-up, without windows, without ventilation, without bunks, and with a dirty floor … Or maybe it was a ‘solitary’ in the Archangel prison, where the glass had been smeared over with red lead so that the only rays of God’s maimed light which crept into you were crimson, and where a 15-watt bulb burned constantly in the ceiling, day and night. Or … where … fourteen of you were crowded together on seven square yards of floor space in such a way you could only shift your legs in unison … and above all, that interminable, irritating roar from the wind tunnel of the neighboring Central Aero- and Hydrodynamics Institute—a roar one could not believe was unintentional… a roar which made it useless to converse and during which one could sing at the top of one’s lungs and the jailer wouldn’t ever hear. And then when the roar stopped, there would ensue a sense of relief … superior to freedom itself.

But it was not the dirty floor, not the murky walls, nor the odor of the latrine bucket you loved—but those fellow prisoners with whom you about-faced at command, that something which beat between your heart and theirs, their sometimes astonishing words, and then, too, the birth within you, on that very spot, of free-floating thought.
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