Professor David Peimer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Part 1
Summary
A two-part exploration of the Russian writer, historian, and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, best known for his works on the Soviet Gulag system. Nobel Prize–winner Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is considered a testament to the importance of speaking out against injustice and continues to resonate profoundly today.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s the eternal question. If we knew that we would probably answer so much about society. But what fascinates me is that these are people sitting in ordinary offices, bureaucracies and government institutions. They are dreaming up these rules, which are the opposite of the rules they claim to live by, but the rules that will be for the camps, not only to break the person, but to control them. And what’s fascinating for me is that link for Solzhenitsyn between the camp is a metaphor for the society. Because if they can dream up these rules for people in the camps, aren’t they doing it for people in the society itself, but just in a more sophisticated, Orwellian language kind of way? That to me is a fascinating addition that Solzhenitsyn adds onto the whole question of running a society and Russian identity. Because if you can imagine it for a camp, why can’t you imagine it in a more sophisticated way, like Orwell, for your own society? Are they so different? And that’s what Foucault talks about in his book, “Madness and Civilization.”
He was a committed Marxist during the war, and a captain, as I said, in the Red Army. But then when all this happened to him afterwards, what is the point of committing himself to Stalinism and the Marxism? This is what happens from a few letters. And I think he started, from what I understand, in the memoirs, he started in the time in the prison camps resurrecting an interest in Russian Orthodox Christianity. And, but he always talked about it from the translation might be not be the best, but from a philosophical point of view, not a sort of obsessive belief in a God, the ideas of the Orthodox Church, of Christianity, and I guess to try and find some other meaning or another approach to believing in compassion, love, kindness, forgiveness.
Yes, well he certainly received royalties when those brief four-year period when Khrushchev was in power. And as I said, this is the only book that was allowed during the whole Soviet communist time, that was allowed to be published and read, by millions of Russians, and studied. And this book, and then others were translated, got into the West, and of course, I don’t know if he got the royalties in the Soviet Union, actually. Good question. Obviously he got the royalties when he went to live in the West, in the early ‘70s, in West Germany first.