Putin congratulates Natalia Solzhenitsyna on her 80th birthday

Yesterday Russian president Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message to Natalia Solzhenitsyna, the author’s widow, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. The message reads, in part:

“You have devoted your life, energy, and creative gift to promoting charity and enlightenment; you stood at the origins of important educational and humanitarian projects, such as the Museum of Russia Abroad, which has become the centre for preserving a huge stratum of Russian history and culture, as related to the émigré community, its lifestyles and traditions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works are an integral and very important part of Russia’s cultural heritage. You were and still are this great writer’s soulmate as well as closest comrade-in-arms; you are doing a lot to preserve his works and ideas and are handing down to posterity the memory about this outstanding and unique man, about his role in asserting the principles of justice and democracy in this country.”

— President Vladimir Putin

And here is one of several pieces on Russian TV marking Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s 80th birthday:

When Solzhenitsyn visited the Hoover Institution at Stanford

A lovely recounting by Bertrand Patenaude, in the Summer issue of Hoover Digest, of Solzhenitsyn’s time spent in the Hoover archives in 1975 and 1976. Solzhenitsyn himself considered the Hoover collections hugely valuable, both for Russian history in general, and for his own specific research into the Revolution.

“For forty years I had been preparing to write about the Revolution in Russia—1976 being forty years from my initial conception of the book—but it was only now at the Hoover Institution that I encountered such an unexpected volume and scope of material that I could leaf through and drink in. It was only now that I truly came to see it all, and seeing it caused a shift in my mind I did not expect. . . . Encountering the materials from the Hoover Institution, I was overwhelmed by these tangible fragments of history from the days of the February Revolution and the period leading up to it. . . . Without this towering, growing heap of living material from those years, how could I have ever imagined that it went like this?”

— - from Between Two Millstones, Book 1, Chapter 4, "At Five Brooks"

Solzhenitsyn on the Future of Russia

Will Morrisey has posted an extensive and careful recapitulation of two of Solzhenitsyn’s essays on the future of Russia: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. Alexis Klimoff translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

These two essays might be said to be part of a quartet of pieces examining Russia’s place in the world and potential paths to the future:

• Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1973)

• Rebuilding Russia (1990)

• The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century (1994)

• Russia in Collapse (1998)

Learn more here.