“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?
In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others – perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I – have perished.
Of them, I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of Gulag1 shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands; and beneath the millstone of shadowing and mistrust I did not talk to them all, of some I only heard, of others still I only guessed. Those who fell into that abyss already bearing a literary name are at least known, but how many were never recognized, never once mentioned in public? And virtually no one managed to return.
A whole national literature remained there, cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe. Russian literature did not cease for a moment, but from the outside it appeared a wasteland! Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, two or three trees overlooked by chance.
Nobel Prize award speech]
Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence.” (emphasis his), Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture
Note: When we were young my wife and I brought our boys to Cavendish Vermont a couple of times in the hopes of meeting the great man, Alexander Solzhenitzyn who lived in scenic exile there. We never did meet him and spoke only with a woman (his wife, housekeeper?) through an intercom at the entrance gate. She kindly apologized in broken English but said he could not break from his work. One wonders today what will become of our children’s children when most people in our time dwell inside the manipulative surveillant forces of an Orwellian 24 x7 State and media, exposed to precious little meaningful and spiritual literature in schools, to say nothing of serious moral reflection.
+ Solzhenitzyn’s profound Harvard Address June 8, 1978
+ Solzhenitsyn’s entire Nobel speech…more relevant than ever.
+ Dostoevsky: The Tale of the Onion
+ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitzyn
“Karl Marx was intent on fomenting war between economic classes; Cultural Marxists have expanded the scope of his target to races, genders, and religious Christians. Identity Politics, or Cultural Marxism, has been the core curriculum of American public and private schools for several generations now.
“To distance themselves from the Communist atrocities they made possible, and to absolve their ideas from responsibility for the catastrophic results, radicals have changed the name of their utopia to “social justice.” But their political mission—civil war in pursuit of a totalitarian ambition to remake the world and dominate its inhabitants—remains the same.” — David Horowitz
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Word of Truth Outweighs The World
By Ralph R. Reiland| APR 2, 2020
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie,” he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.”
“It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education,” stated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian historian, philosopher, political prisoner, awardee of The Nobel Prize in Literature, and influential critic of the Soviet Union, communism, and the oppression by Russia of its own citizens, raising global awareness of its Gulag system of forced labor camps.
An estimated 13 million deaths of Soviet citizens were directly caused by Stalin’s purges, labor camps and other oppressive measures to secure and expand his autocratic power.
Nearly doubling Stalin’s death toll is the body count of as many as 25 million deaths in the former Soviet bloc, based on research of hitherto inaccessible Soviet archives, an ideological massacre through class oppression, criminalization of political adversaries, purposeful famines, mass deportations, terrorism, slave labor camps, partisan executions, collectivized starvations, political assassinations, government lawlessness, and ideological exterminations, as documented in sheer detail in The Black Book of Communism, an 800-page compendium by an eminent team of scholars on the worldwide atrocities of communist regimes, Harvard University Press, 1999.
Millions of Russians were arrested on trumped-up charges, tried and convicted in rigged trials and subsequently executed or sentenced to lethal labor camps.
Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer with the Russian Army in World War II, was arrested in February 1945 and sentenced to eight years in Gulag camps, to be followed by permanent internal exile, for writing uncomplimentary comments about Stalin’s handling of the war in private letters to a former school friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, a Soviet Army Captain.
Under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, Solzhenitsyn was charged with “founding a hostile organization,” of two.
Vitkevich was similarly apprehended in 1945, with Soviet operatives presenting him with his correspondence with Solzhenitsyn, citing behavior inappropriate for a combat officer and justifying his arrest for violating of Article 58 of the Criminal Code forbidding “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers’ Union, an indispensable membership to get work published in Russia, and charged with “anti-social behavior” for the publication of August 1941 and Gulag Archipelago, exposing Soviet horrors to his fellow citizens and “enemies” abroad.
In response to his banishment, Solzhenitsyn circulated an Open Letter to the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union — an excerpt:
“It is high time to remember that we belong first and foremost to humanity. And that man has distinguished himself from the animal world by THOUGHT and SPEECH. And these, naturally should be FREE. Honest and complete OPENNESS – that is the first condition of health in all societies. He who does not wish this openness for his fatherland does not want to purify it of its diseases, but only to drive them inwards, to fester.
“At this time of crisis you are incapable of suggesting anything constructive, anything good for society, which is gravely sick, only your hatred.”
“ ‘The enemy will overhear’ – that is your excuse. Hatred, a hatred no better than racial hatred, has become your sterile atmosphere.”
The condemnation Solzhenitsyn received wasn’t due to the color of his skin, religion, or his national origin. His wrongdoing was his bravery, intelligence, and independence. His strength and value, and supposed threat, came from his honesty, skill and voice. He wasn’t controlled and refused to be deferential to doctrine, cruelty or duplicity.
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie,” he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Source
+ Solzhenitzyn and Democracy, 1975: “The name Solzhenitzyn has fallen on hard times”
Listen to The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn on Audible.
Catholic Critique 