Alexander Issaiévich Soljenítsin (em russo: Александр Исаевич Солженицын; Kislovodsk, 11 de Dezembro de 1918 — Moscovo, 3 de Agosto de 2008) foi um romancista, dramaturgo e historiador russo cujas obras consciencializaram o mundo quanto aos gulags, sistema de campos de trabalhos forçados existente na antiga União Soviética. Recebeu o Nobel de Literatura de 1970, e foi expulso de sua terra natal em1974.
Alexander Soljenítsin nasceu em Kislovodsk, pequena cidade do sul da Rússia, na região localizada entre o Mar Negro e o Mar Cáspio, filho póstumo de Isaac Soljenítsin, um oficial do exército czarista, e da sua jovem viúva, Taisia Soljenítsina. O seu avô materno havia superado as suas origens humildes e adquirido uma grande propriedade na região de Kuban, no sopé da grande cadeia de montanhas do Cáucaso. Durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial, Taisia fora estudar em Moscovo, onde conhecera o seu futuro marido. (Soljenítsin relataria vividamente a história de sua família em suas obras "Agosto de 1914" e "A Roda Vermelha".)
Em 1918 Taisia encontrou-se grávida, mas pouco depois receberia notícia da morte do seu marido num acidente de caça. Esse fato, o confisco da propriedade de seu avô pelas novas autoridades comunistas, e a Guerra Civil Russa disputada ao redor, levaram às circunstâncias bastante modestas da infância de Aleksandr. Mais tarde ele diria que sua mãe lutava pela mera sobrevivência, e que os elos de seu pai com o antigo regime tinham que ser mantidos em segredo. O menino exibia conspícuas tendências literárias e científicas, que sua mãe incentivava como bem podia. Esta viria a falecer aos fins de 1939.
Soljenítsin estudou matemática na Universidade Estatal de Rostov, ao mesmo tempo cursando por correspondência o Instituto de Filosofia, Literatura e História de Moscovo. Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial participou de acções importantes como comandante de uma companhia de artilharia do Exército Soviético, obtendo a patente de capitão e sendo condecorado em duas ocasiões.
[editar]Prisão e início da carreira literária
Algumas semanas antes do fim do conflito, já havendo alcançado território alemão na Prússia Oriental, foi preso por agentes da NKVD por fazer alusões críticas a Stalin em correspondência a um amigo. Foi condenado a oito anos num campo de trabalhos forçados, a serem seguidos por exílio interno em perpetuidade.
A primeira parte da pena de Soljenítsin foi cumprida em vários campos de trabalhos forçados; a "fase intermediária", como ele viria a referir-se a esta época, passou-a em uma sharashka, um instituto de pesquisas onde os cientistas e outros colaboradores eram prisioneiros. Dessas experiências surgiria o livro "O Primeiro Círculo", publicado no exterior em 1968. Em 1950 foi enviado a um "campo especial" para prisioneiros políticos em Ekibastuz, Cazaquistão onde trabalharia como pedreiro, mineiro e metalúrgico. Esta época inspiraria o livro "Um Dia na Vida de Ivan Denisovich". Neste campo retiraram-lhe um tumor, mas seu cancro não chegou a ser diagnosticado.
A partir de Março de 1953, iniciou a pena de exílio perpétuo em Kol-Terek no sul do Cazaquistão. O seu cancro, ainda não detectado, continuou a espalhar-se, e no fim do ano Soljenítsin encontrava-se próximo à morte. Porém, em 1954 finalmente recebeu tratamento adequado em Tashkent, Uzbequistão, e curou-se. Estes eventos formaram a base de " O Pavilhão dos Cancerosos".
Durante os seus anos de exílio, e após sua libertação e retorno à Rússia Europeia, Soljenítsin, enquanto leccionava em escolas secundárias durante o dia, passava as noites escrevendo em segredo. Mais tarde, na breve autobiografia que escreveria ao receber o Nobel de Literatura, relataria que "durante todos os anos até 1961, eu não estava apenas convencido que sequer uma linha por mim escrita jamais seria publicada durante a minha vida, mas também raramente ousava permitir que os meus íntimos lessem o que eu havia escrito por medo de que o facto se tornasse conhecido".
Publicou ainda nos EUA uma obra sobre um gigantesco tabu que é a proeminência dos judeus russos no Partido Comunista e na polícia secreta soviética, sendo tachado como anti-ssemita e desmoralizado no seu exílio.[1].
Soljenítsin morreu em Moscovo em 3 de Agosto de 2008, segundo o seu filho, em consequência de uma insuficiência cardíaca aguda[2][3].
Wang was born into a poor family in Beijing of Manchu background. He worked as an editor for a newspaper agency and as a clerk for a merchant association before becoming a writer. He lived through the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement and began writing novels in the 1930s. Most of Wang's early works were of the detective and mystery fiction genres.
He started writing wuxia novels after moving to Qingdao. Between 1938 and 1949, Wang wrote 16 wuxia novels. In 1949, Wang stopped writing and became a school teacher after the Chinese Civil War ended. He was sentenced to farm labour during the Cultural Revolution and died from illness in 1977 after the revolution. At the time of his death, Wang had written a total of 30 novels. Wang was married to Li Danquan and they had more than three children.
Li Danquan met film director Ang Lee during the shooting of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (an adaptation of one of Wang's works) in 1999.
[edit]
Works
Wang is best known for his wuxia-romance novels, which usually have tragic endings, as well as his social-romance novels. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of the modern genre of wuxia, along with other established wuxia writers such as Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng. Within the genre, Wang had secured his place as one of the "Ten Great Writers" and one of the "Four Great Writers of the Northern School", along with Li Shoumin, Gong Baiyu and Zheng Zhengyin.
Zhang Gansheng, a scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, has characterized Wang as perfecting the wuxia genre, and paving the way for a generation of great writers. However, according to Xu Sinian, another scholar, there has not been any detailed critique of Wang's works, apart from that of the Taiwanese scholar Ye Hongsheng.
[edit]
The Crane-Iron Series
Wang is remembered for his five-part epic wuxia-romance series, often called collectively the Crane-Iron Series (鶴鐵系列), named after the first characters in the titles of the first and last installments in the series. The stories chronicle the struggles of four generations of youxias. These are the titles under which they are now published, in order of their internal chronology (that is, not in the order they were originally composed or published):
Crane Frightens Kunlun (鶴驚崑崙)
Precious Sword, Golden Hairpin (寶劍金釵)
Sword Force, Pearl Shine (劍氣珠光)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍)
Iron Knight, Silver Vase (鐵騎銀瓶)
The first book of the series, Crane Startles Kunlun, was written third, after Sword Spirit, Pearl Light, and serialized under the title Dancing Crane, Singing Luan (舞鶴鳴鸞記).
Ang Lee's 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, includes episodes and information from some of the other books in the series, apart from the novel which shares the same title as the film. The official website of actress Michelle Yeoh, who starred in the film, has an English-language summary of the five books.[1]
As of 2011, no official English language translations of his novels exist. However, there is a manhua series of the same title, (now in its second, revised edition) created by Andy Seto. They depart substantially from the written text.
As of 2012, there is currently an unofficial English translation in progress of the first novel, Crane Frightens Kunlun (鶴驚崑崙
Born in Niles, Michigan, Ring Lardner was the son of wealthy parents Henry and Lena Phillips Lardner. He was the youngest of nine children. Lardner's name came from a cousin of the same name. The cousin, in turn had been named by Lardner's uncle, Rear AdmiralJames L. Lardner, who had decided to name his son after a friend, Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold, who was from a distinguished militaryfamily. Lardner never liked his given name and shortened it, naming one of his sons Ring Jr.
Lardner was married to Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana in 1911. They had four sons, John, James, Ring Jr., and David. John was a newspaperman, sports columnist and magazine writer. James, also a newspaperman, was killed in the Spanish Civil War fighting with theInternational Brigades. Ring Lardner, Jr. was a screenwriter who was blacklisted after the Second World War as one of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters who were incarcerated for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions posed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He won two Academy Awards for his screenplays—one before his imprisonment and blacklisting (for Woman of the Year in 1942), and one after (for M*A*S*H in 1970).[1] His book, The Lardners, My Family Remembered (ISBN 0-06-012517-9), is a reliable source of Lardner information. David worked for The New Yorker as a general reporter and war correspondent before he was killed by a landmine near Aachen, Germany in October 1944, less than one month after his arrival to the European Theater of war. Lardner was a grand uncle to 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner George Lardner, Jr., a journalist at The Washington Post since 1963.[2]
[edit]Writing career
In 1913, Lardner provided lyrics for "That Old Quartet" for composer Nathaniel D. Mann.
In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by "Jack Keefe", a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made heavy use of the fictional author's idiosyncratic vernacular. It had initially been published as six separate but interrelated short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, leading some to classify the book as a collection of stories; others, as a novel. Like most of Lardner's stories, You Know Me Al employed satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. "Ring Lardner thought of himself as primarily a sports columnist whose stuff wasn't destined to last, and he held to that absurd belief even after his first masterpiece, You Know Me Al, was published in 1916 and earned the awed appreciation of Virginia Woolf, among other very serious, unfunny people", wrote Andrew Ferguson, who named it, in a Wall Street Journal article, one of the top five pieces of American humor writing.[3]
Lardner went on to write such well-known stories as "Haircut", "Some Like Them Cold", "The Golden Honeymoon", "Alibi Ike", and "A Day with Conrad Green". He also continued to write follow-up stories to You Know Me Al, with the hero of that book, the headstrong but gullible Jack Keefe, experiencing various ups and downs in his major league career and in his personal life. Private Keefe's World War I letters home to his friend Al were collected in Treat 'Em Rough.
Lardner also had a lifelong fascination with the theatre, although his only success was June Moon, a comedy co-written with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman. He did write a series of brief nonsense plays which poked fun at the conventions of the theatre using zany, offbeat humor and outrageous, impossible stage directions, such as "The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week."
Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. He was published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald's editor. To create his first book of short stories Lardner had to get copies from the magazines he'd sold them to—he held his own short stories in light regard and did not save copies.
He was in some respects the model for the tragic character Abe North in Fitzgerald's last completed novel, Tender Is the Night.[citation needed] With the exception of You Know Me Al, which was initially written and published as six separate stories, Lardner never wrote a novel, but is considered by many to be one of America's best writers of the short story.
Lardner was also a well-known sports columnist, who began his career as a teenager with the South Bend Tribune. Soon after, he took a position with the rival South Bend Times, the first of many professional switches. In 1907, Lardner moved to Chicago, where he joined the Inter-Ocean, considered the worst newspaper in the city. Within the space of a year, he moved up to the Chicago Examiner, then to the Tribune.[4] Two years later, Lardner was in St. Louis, writing the humorous baseball column "Pullman Pastimes" for Taylor Spink and theSporting News; some of this work was the genesis for You Know Me Al. Within three months, he was an employee of the Boston American.
Lardner returned to the Chicago Tribune in 1913, which became the home paper for his syndicated "In the Wake of the News" column (started by Hugh Keough, who died in 1912); it appeared in more than 100 newspapers, and still runs in the Tribune.
Sarah Bembrey has written about a singular event in Lardner's sportswriting experience: "In 1919 something happened that changed his way of reporting about sports and changed his love for baseball. This was the Black Sox scandal when the Chicago White Sox sold out the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Ring was exceptionally close to the White Sox and felt he was betrayed by the team. After the scandal, Ring always wrote about sports as if there were some kink to the outcome."[4]
Walter Allen stated "It is like Lardner perfectly feeds a specific American trait into every character of every story he ever wrote."
In the 1988 movie about the Black Sox, Eight Men Out, writer-director John Sayles (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lardner) portrayed Lardner as one of the clear-eyed observers who were not taken in by the conspiracy. In one scene, Sayles strolls through the White Sox train, singing a parody of the song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", changed to "I'm Forever Throwing Ballgames".[5]
Lardner's last baseball writing was Lose with a Smile in 1933.
Lardner influenced Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr.[6] The two met in December, 1928 thanks to Max Perkins but did not become friends.[7]
He died September 25, 1933, at age 48 in East Hampton, New York, of complications from tuberculosis.
After his death, J.D. Salinger referred to Lardner in two of his works: The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.
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