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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Breaking boundaries: how erstwhile physics teacher Alexandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature

30 Sep 2022 Hamish Johnston

With the 2022 Nobel prizes due to be announced, Physics World editors look at the physicists who’ve won prizes in fields other than their own. Here, Hamish Johnston looks at the small but important role physics played in the life of the Russian author and dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn teaching at Kok-Terek

The Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. As far as I can tell, he never wanted to be a physicist, but his knowledge of physics and mathematics defined his stint in the Red Army and may have saved his life when he was exiled to Kazakhstan in the 1950s.

Born in southern Russia in 1918, Solzhenitsyn had aspired to be a writer from an early age. However, he was unable to pursue a university education in literature and instead enrolled in the department of mathematics at Rostov State University. While he excelled at mathematics, he decided that he wasn’t going to devote his life to it, choosing to write instead.

However, events soon overtook this ambition. Solzhenitsyn graduated from university in 1941, just a few days before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. After several months of driving horse-drawn vehicles for the army, his background in mathematics led to his command of a company that calculated the positions of enemy artillery from the sound of their gunfire. So, I think it’s safe to say Solzhenitsyn spent three years working as an applied physicist and he was decorated for the accuracy of his work.

Criticizing Stalin

Solzhenitsyn was still serving in 1945 when he was arrested for making disparaging remarks about Soviet leader Josef Stalin in letters to a childhood friend. Further “evidence” of Solzhenitsyn’s sedition was found in his unpublished early writings, and he was sentenced to eight years in a detention camp.

After he completed his sentence in 1953, he was “exiled for life” and sent to Kok-Terek, an isolated village in Kazakhstan,  thousands of kilometres east of Moscow. There he taught physics and mathematics, something that he would later write “helped to ease my existence and made it possible for me to write”. He goes on to say that if he had the literary education that he so desired as a youth, “it is quite likely that I should not have survived these ordeals but would instead have been subjected to even greater pressures”.

Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer while in Kazakhstan and was successfully treated in Tashkent before his exile ended in 1956 and he returned to the western Soviet Union.

Writing in exile

Solzhenitsyn wrote secretly in exile, and it wasn’t until after the public repudiation of Stalin that his first work was published in 1962. This was the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which like much of his work chronicles life in the Soviet Union’s Gulag forced labour camps.

Denisovich was published with the blessing of Nikita Khrushchev, who had replaced Stalin. However, when Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 Solzhenitsyn’s books were banned. He didn’t travel to Sweden in 1970 to accept his Nobel prize because he feared being barred from returning home. Indeed, in 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union – only returning to Russia in 1994. He died in 2008.

While Solzhenitsyn would probably not have considered himself a physicist, we should be grateful that teaching physics gave him succour and allowed him to tell the world about the immense hardships suffered by the many Soviet citizens who were oppressed by their own government.

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