Alexandre Soljenitsyne
Russian writer, eight years in the Soviet camps, who tells that world in The Gulag Archipelago and sees there a line between good and evil running through every heart.
Life
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), a Russian writer, spent eight years in Soviet camps and then in internal exile, after a 1945 sentence. He made that system known to the world with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973), and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Expelled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. His work asks about evil: the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
Main works
A literary investigation of the Soviet camp system, in which the author sees that evil comes from within every person.
A novel of one day in the life of a camp prisoner, which first revealed the Gulag to a wide public.
In his own words
« If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? »
Если б это было так просто! — что где-то есть чёрные люди, злокозненно творящие чёрные дела, и надо только отличить их от остальных и уничтожить. Но линия, разделяющая добро и зло, пересекает сердце каждого человека. И кто уничтожит кусок своего сердца?
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHis time in the camps led him to belief in God, and he later held that many modern disasters come from men forgetting God.
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
He opposes a purely legal and relativist outlook and speaks of absolute good and truth that the writer must serve.
Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (1970); Harvard Commencement Address (1978)
He blames rationalist humanism for cutting man off from the spiritual and calls for a return to religious consciousness.
Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 'A World Split Apart' (1978)
Looking back on the camps, he finds that suffering made him grow spiritually: life has a meaning in the growth of the soul, not in prosperity.
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, 'The Ascent' (1975)
He sees humans as imperfect, never free of pride, self-interest, envy and vanity, and criticizes a humanism that makes man the measure of all things.
Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, "A World Split Apart" (1978)