Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and its totalitarianism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward, August 1914, and The Gulag...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 December 1918
CityKislovodsk, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history
In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.
A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.'
Not all of me shall die.
The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.
Who will dare say he has defined art?
Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.
We will die, but art will remain.
Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!