Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Novelist, Author

1918 – 2008

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Who was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system. While his writings were long suppressed in the USSR, he wrote many books, most notably The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914 and Cancer Ward. 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.

Famous Quotes:

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
  • A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
  • It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
  • Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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Born
Dec 11, 1918
Kislovodsk
Also known as
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
  • Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
  • Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
  • Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit͡syn
  • Alexandre Soljenitsyne
  • Alexander Solschenizyn
  • Solzhenitsyn
Parents
Spouses
Children
Religion
  • Russian Orthodox Church
Ethnicity
  • Russian
Nationality
  • Russia
Profession
Education
  • Southern Federal University
  • Rostov State University
Lived in
  • Vermont
Died
Aug 3, 2008
Moscow

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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