Obituary
逝者
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴
Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author and dissident, died on August 3rd, aged 89
亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴，俄罗斯作家、持不同政见者，于8月3日去世，终年89岁
PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent-an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside.
人们知道那个地方：广阔无垠令人惊异的古拉格。”虽然它是星罗棋布的群岛，但是在心理上，它已经被融合成一块大陆–一块几乎看不见又难以触摸的大陆。” 随着一辆辆火车的进入，内务部的人被派去管理这里。在亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴到过那里之前，这个地方很少被外界所了解。索尔仁尼琴曾在那里度过了八年的岁月，在那里烧砖打铁，听着狱友像老鼠一样在晚上偷他的食物，因为很小的错误就被带上手拷。《古拉格群岛》是一本揭示”对我曾有切肤之痛的”集中营的书，并为仍在其中的人做出见证。
Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time.
自从1973年这本书首次出现，索尔仁尼琴立即被苏联驱逐出境。但是他的工作完成了。他暴露了这个体系的裂缝。自从十一年前赫鲁晓夫开始解禁文学，索尔仁尼琴在《新世界》杂志上发表的《伊万•杰尼索维奇的一天》标志着真理论述的开始。这个故事以监狱里刺耳的起床号开始，”锤子打击长横木的声音”穿透结着两指厚冰霜的窗户。在这样穿过不易透过物体的声响下，俄罗斯人民打开了个人崇拜的潘多拉盒子，并在相当长一段时间内为此而活着。在这之后，虽然仍有非常的迟钝，但是苏联解体只是个时间问题了。
He was not another Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Often the characters in Mr Solzhenitsyn’s books were one-dimensional, the tone sardonic, the detail turgid. But his indestructibility gave him, over the years, a prophet’s voice. He survived the war, the camps and abdominal cancer that was carelessly treated. He was told he would never have children, but had three sons. He believed he would never return to Russia after his exile, but in 1994 was welcomed back to the post-Soviet state. Each miracle increased his sense of mission. He was not simply a writer, but a visionary who would mend Russia; and, as such, he believed he was on equal terms with Soviet leaders. In 1973, in a letter to them, he laid out his proposals. There was nothing wrong with a Soviet empire; but they had to cast off “this filthy sweaty shirt” of Marxist ideology, all these “arsenals of lies”. Socialism, he wrote, “prevents the living body of the nation from breathing.”
他不是另一个托尔斯泰或者陀斯妥耶夫斯基。通常索尔仁尼琴书的特征是一维的–腔调讥讽，细节冗长。但是在过去很多年后，他的不可毁灭性给予了他先知的地位。他经历过战争，集中营和腹部癌症的考验，但是他都生存了下来。（他患癌症并未获得精心治疗）他曾被告知会终身不育，但是他却有三个孩子。他相信他在流亡之后再也无法返回俄罗斯，但是在1994年他却被欢迎返回那个后苏联国家。每一个奇迹都增加了他对使命的意义。他不仅仅是个作家，而且是有远见卓识的，能重振俄罗斯的人。而且，以其身份来说，他认为他和苏联领导人相当。在1973年他对苏联领导人的一封信中，他列出了他的建议。苏联帝国没有错，但是他们必须脱下马克思主义的”肮脏外衣”，和所有的”谎言的思想武库”。他写道，社会主义”阻止了这个国家生命的躯体的呼吸。”
Behind his impassive kulak’s face lay intense self-scrutiny, adamantine moral and physical courage and a sometimes unsettling disregard for the smaller and softer things in life. But he did not necessarily think he was better, or wiser, than other men. Only a fluke, he said, had kept him out of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, when they came recruiting at his university. As for the war, though the Nazis had unleashed atrocities on Russia, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder-straps and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?'” In one poem, “Prussian Nights”, he wrote:
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse
在他令人影响深刻的富农面孔的背后有着强烈的自我探究、坚定的道德力量、物质勇气以及有时对于世间渺小软弱事情的蔑视。但是他并不是必定地认为他比其它人更出色，更睿智。他说，由于一个很偶然的机遇，使他能够侥幸没有在大学校园里被斯大林的秘密警察–内政部人民委员会警察（译者注：克格勃的前身）招录。对于战争来说，虽然纳粹将邪恶的力量发泄到俄罗斯身上，”我记得我扛着我的上尉肩章在急行军中穿越东普鲁士，躲避着炮火，我喊着：‘我们还会更好吗？'” 在一首”普鲁士之夜”的诗里，他写道：
小小的女儿躺在床上
死亡。有多少死亡在这里
一排人，一连人？
一个女孩已经变成一个女人
一个女人已经变成一具死尸
Salvo after salvo rattled from the Solzhenitsyn typewriter, always interleaved with carbon copies for fear that the secret police would seize the manuscript. Some fell on deaf ears-wilfully deaf, in the case of the European left. The notion that Stalin was a great wartime leader, for example, should never have survived the devastating portrait of sickly paranoia in “The First Circle” (1969). Yet it has persisted to this day.
一行行的文字从索尔仁尼琴的打字机中嘎嘎敲出，通常隔行还备有副本，以防止秘密警察将其手稿夺走。有些人确故意装聋作哑，比如欧洲的左派。例如斯大林是个伟大的战时领袖的概念没有能够使得《第一圈》中对于患病偏执狂的引人注目的描写保留下来。甚至一直坚持到今天。
Though supporters in the West lumped Mr Solzhenitsyn with the rest of the intelligentsia, he stood monumentally alone. A friendship with an Estonian prisoner, Arnold Susi, had exploded his lingering belief in Marxism; but he detested the self-regarding and snooty Russian intellectuals, the “well-read ones”, as he referred to them. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, he had no belief in liberalism or human-rights campaigns. The fact that scientists might be deprived of visas left him unmoved. He cared about the fate of peasants and the general citizenry, Russians in the mass. Ivan Denisovich was not an intellectual: he was a peasant who was horrified to discover, in a letter from his wife, that the farmers in his village were now working in factories rather than haymaking. The creation of Soviet man was the horror Mr Solzhenitsyn chiefly wished to reverse.
虽然西方的支持者将索尔仁尼琴先生与其他知识界的人放到一起来考虑，但是他确实是特立独行。与一个爱沙尼亚的囚犯阿诺德•苏西的友谊打破了他对于马克思主义挥之不去的信念。但是他也非常憎恨利己主义这和被他称作”博学者”的媚上傲下的俄罗斯知识分子。与安德烈•萨哈罗夫（译者注：俄罗斯氢弹之父，诺贝尔奖获得者）不同，他对自由主义和人权运动没有信心。而实际上科学家被剥夺签证使他无法走动。他关心俄罗斯大部分农民和市民的命运。在他夫人给他的一封信中说：伊万•杰尼索维奇并不是个知识分子，而是一个让人吃惊的农民，他现在在他村子的工厂工作而不是在割晒干草。苏联创造的人是索尔仁尼琴先生最恐怖的事情，也是最想推翻的事情。
Neither East nor West
既非东方也非西方
Yet he had little time for the West either. Bundled on to a plane to West Germany in 1974, he turned his fire on other targets, thundering against materialism, shallowness and the silliness of popular Western culture. He would be no cold-war figurehead against the Kremlin and all its works; he was, to the core, a Russian nationalist. As communism fell he came to loathe Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s leader, seeing him as the author of chaos and humiliation. But bitterness and envy may have played a part, too. Bitterness because his hero’s welcome had turned into indifference to this dishevelled, hectoring, old-fashioned figure. And envy because Yeltsin stood in the place he should, he believed, have occupied himself.
然而他对西方的时间也很少。在1974年被塞进一架飞往西德的飞机后，他转移了他攻击的目标–他异乎寻常地反对物质主义，肤浅主义以及西方流行文化的愚蠢。他不是反对克里姆林宫的冷战傀儡，而是十足的俄罗斯爱国主义者。在共产主义垮台后，他开始憎恨俄罗斯领袖鲍瑞斯•叶利钦，把他看作俄罗斯混乱和羞辱的制造者。但是这其中也有悲愤和妒忌的原因。悲愤是由于他受到的英雄式的欢迎变成了对散乱和欺凌漠不关心的过时的形象。妒忌是因为叶利钦站在了他认为他应该站的位置。
译者：rushor http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13227&extra=page%3D1