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Date of Birth
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11-December-1918
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Place of Birth
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Kislovodsk
(Russia, Stavropol Krai)
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Nationality
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Soviet Union, Russia
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Also know as
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit͡syn, Alexandre Soljenitsyne, Alexander Solschenizyn, Solzhenitsyn
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Profession
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Writer, Novelist, Soldier, Teacher
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Quotes
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- Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you -- you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
- In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
- Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
- It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
- You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again.
- The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
- I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
- I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
- Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
- Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
- A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
- One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
- Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
- For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
- Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
- When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
- Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
- Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
- For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
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Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was an eminent Russian novelist, historian, and tireless critic of Soviet totalitarianism. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system. While his writings were often suppressed, he wrote many books, most notably The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Two Hundred Years Together. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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