Aleksandr solzhenitsyn russian dissident
Aleksandr solzhenitsyn russian dissident*Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was becoming a dissident against the U.S.S.R. and the restricting communist government after he was arrested for the first time. He, through his entire life, was willing to sacrifice everything he had in order to point out that censorship was wrong and people should be able to speak their mind.
*His childhood years were very rough. Aleksandr (pronounced Alexander) was born in Kisovodsk, Russia on December 11, 1918 (Academic American Encyclopedia Sno-Sz, p 59). His father was an artillery officer in World War I, and his mother was a typist and stenographer. Aleksandr never knew his father, because he died in a hunting accident before Aleksandr was born. After his father died, the Soviet government only allowed menial employment to his mother, so his family lived in relative poverty. Other than that, Aleksandr's childhood was relatively normal. He was a member of the Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent to Boy Scouts, and later joined the Communist Youth League. At the age of nine he decided he wanted to be a writer, and before he was eighteen he decided that he was going to write a novel about the Russian Revolution. He said that during his childhood he "bore this social tension - on one hand, they used to tell me everything at home, and on the other, they used to work our minds at school. And so this collision between two worlds gave birth to such social tension inside me that somehow defined the path I was to follow for the rest of my life." Aleksandr had little literary education and read few western novels, and later said he regretted it (Major 20TH Century Writers, p 2792-2793).
*After grade school Aleksandr went to the University of Rostov-on-Don and graduated in 1941, majoring in mathematics and physics (Encarta 99). After he graduated, he served as a captain of artillery in World War II from 1941 through 1945 (World Book Encyclopedia So-Sz, p 587). While he was serving, he was falsely accused of writing antistalinistic remarks in his personal correspondence and arrested on February 8, 1945. He was sentenced without a trial and sent to Moscow's notorious Lubyanka Prison for eight years (World Book Encyclopedia So-Sz, p 587). Oddly enough, the prison had a good library where he read otherwise unobtainable books. The books he read were by American authors, and this profoundly affected him and his writing (Major 20TH Century Writers, p 2793). Later he was transferred to a special prison in which the prisoners were scientists and technicians; Aleksandr was a mathematician (Academic American Encyclopedia Sno-Sz, p 59). There, everything they wrote was subject to inspection, so he mentally composed and memorized poems, verse by verse (Major 20TH Century Writers, p 2793). While Aleksandr was in prison, he was diagnosed and treated for cancer in a prison hospital. This later influenced...
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