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
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.
Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).
Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.