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
The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.
Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.
You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in you power.
Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.
Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.