Description:

Solzhenitsyn Alexander

1pp TLS on unmarked cream 8.5” x 5.5” paper slip in Russian Cyrillic dated April 3, 1987 and signed by Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, signed with an abbreviated signature but full sig appears on envelope, as “A. Solzhenitsyn” in black pen in lower right corner. In very good condition, with overall toning and numerous folds and corner creases, some sharp. One typographical error is crossed out on line 6. Accompanied by a 2006 stamped white airmail envelope inscribed overall and signed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as “A. Solzhenitsyn, 12 Tverskaya Street Apt., 169 Moscow, Russia” in return address portion at upper left. Both the 1987 TLS and 2006 postmarked envelope are addressed to Michael Heifetz (born 1934), a Russian Jewish journalist who emigrated to Israel in 1980.

The TLS reads as follows:

“Dear Mikhail,

(I’m sorry, but I don’t know your patronymic).

Thank you for sending me the books:  now and before.  I am glad that you so brightly/here and in “Boundaries”/continue to illuminate the Gulag in the most recent times/so that the memory of it will never be extinguished.

I never miss your articles in “22”/I agree with much of what you write/with the articles concerning Voslensky less so.

I wish you all kinds of success.  Kind wishes.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn”

Solzhenitsyn, a Gulag survivor, thanked Heifetz for sending him books about the Soviet prison system. The two had a lot in common, as both were expatriate Russian writers critical of the U.S.S.R. Heifetz had published articles in two periodicals mentioned in the letter, Boundaries and 22. Yet the intellectuals disagreed about the ideas of “Voslensky”. This probably refers to Michael Voslensky (1920-1997), whose 1984 book Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, analyzed the Soviet police state. Specifically, Solzhenitsyn and Heifetz diverged on Volensky’s interpretation of the socio-political role of Jews in Russia. Sixteen years later, in 2003, Solzhenitsyn published a book about the history of Russian-Jewish relations called Two Hundred Years Together. The book was controversial, as some perceived it to uphold classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

In 1987, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been stateless for thirteen years. The former World War II veteran and one-time Communist devotee had become an enemy of the Soviet state in 1945. Solzhenitsyn started to doubt the Soviet political system when he witnessed brutal wartime practices perpetrated against German and Polish refugees. He was imprisoned in a Soviet work camp between 1945-1953. Following the publication of several works criticizing historical Soviet leadership and practices, most notably the Gulag Archipelago in 1973, Solzhenitsyn was deported in 1974. The exiled intellectual lived in West Germany, Switzerland, and the United States before returning to Russia in 1994.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work incorporating Solzhenitsyn’s personal experiences as a work camp prisoner with other witness testimonies and primary resources. This damning portrait of the Soviet penal system was published during a period in which the policies of both Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and Josef Stalin (1878-1953) were being reevaluated.

Former Gulag prisoner Solzhenitsyn and Jewish refugee Heifetz aim to expose the systematic ruthlessness of the Soviet machine!

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