Word: solzhenitsyns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lecture was supremely worth waiting for. The persecuted author, who has spent eleven years in Stalinist prisons and in exile, mourns his fellow Russian writers who died in concentration camps. Solzhenitsyn writes: "In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read...I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps but hundreds and even thousands of them-steep, unyielding, frozen steps leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others-perhaps with greater gifts and more strength than I-have perished...As I stand here today, accompanied...
...Solzhenitsyn castigates the West as well as the Soviet Union for the untrammeled violence that he sees "brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world." He cites the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, "when tanks flooded the streets of a foreign capital with blood" and "hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and conflagrations" in the West as actions by the forces of evil "that are determined to convulse and destroy civilization." He warns: "And they may well succeed...
...Solzhenitsyn bitterly criticizes those in the West who pursue prosperity and material wellbeing, comfortably ignoring "all the groans, the stifled cries, the destroyed lives" as long as these remain at a distance. He characterizes the United Nations as an "immoral organization in an immoral world," which "jealously guards the freedom of some nations" while neglecting private appeals by "plain humble individuals." In an evident allusion to the West's present efforts at détente with the Soviet Union, which he compares with acquiescence to Hitler at Munich in 1938, he writes: "The timid civilized world has found nothing...
...otherwise deeply pessimistic statement, Solzhenitsyn suggests that world literature has the power to help mankind. In a passage that concludes one of the most eloquent appeals to conscience in 20th century letters, Solzhenitsyn poses this question: "What can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle...
Discord. His goal, he said, was to bring the best of the humanities to ordinary Americans. High on his agenda, for example, were proposals to finance a television series on Shakespeare's plays and novels by Charles Dickens and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In this, he took what critics have called a "strict constructionist" view of the humanities, saying the endowment should refuse to finance "Classic Comics-culture simplified and castrated." Declared Berman: "I'm a professional scholar and naturally want to preserve the best in our humanist traditions...