Following on from all the excitement of April Fools’ Day (sorry If I got all your hopes up 😉), I wanted to drag things back to some sort of normality - if Suss's fiendish Easter competition will let us!!!?
We had an on-line get-together before Christmas and MajorPaul mentioned Albert Camus - someone he was studying as part of his degree. Now, I’ve never heard of Camus and maybe Paul will post to tell us all about him??? The mention of someone I've never heard of, got me thinking about all those Boomtown Rats songs that refer to actual characters from history. In many cases, I’m not really sure who these people are that we’ve got so used to singling about.
So, every now and then I thought we’d explore real characters from history - people that either get a name-check in a Boomtown Rats song or people that really inspire us but maybe most of us have never heard of.... and I’m gonna kick off with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
In Hurt Hurts (Mondo Bongo), Bob sings “Instant Solzhenitsyn, I get salt-mines when I hear your voice, it hurts”. So who was he?
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian dissident and outspoken critic of communism. He served in the Red Army during the Second World War but because of his outspoken criticism of Stalin, was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the gulag followed by internal exile.
Under Krushchev’s post-war leadership, he was released and exonerated in 1956 and began writing novels about his own experiences under the Soviet ‘criminal’ system. His first novel was approved by Krushchev and published in 1962 but his subsequent books increasingly outraged the authorities. Things came to a head in 1974 when his manuscript for “The Gulag Archipelago” was seized. The seven part book was heavily critical of the Soviet prison camp system and led to Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship being withdrawn.
Although the manuscript for 'The Gulag Archipeligo' had been taken from him, Solzhenitsyn was able to continue to work in secret, and eventually managed to get the book published. It received the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature because of its "head-on challenge to the Soviet state".
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested again but this time he was deported to Germany. Even after having been deported, the KGB continued to discredit and slander him, leading him to move with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the end of The Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until the end of his life.
In the context of his name-check in Hurt Hurts, his time in the west is perhaps most interesting. Although he admired the political liberty of the West, Solzhenitsyn was very critical of what he saw as the “…ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the modern West…”, particularly television and pop music, which he hated.
After surviving cancer in the 1950s and an attempt by the KGB to poison him in 1971, he died of natural causes in 2008 aged 89.
Very insightful Col. A great new feauture you’ve thought of 👍🏻