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.
I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out - most importantly in the spiritual sense.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.
When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.