“Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience … from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, wrote
some of the great pieces of world literature in his historic novels The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovitch. To read them is to see great
writing unfold in conversations and images that Solzhenitsyn shares, and to have
a true understanding of the horrors that faced ordinary people daring to confront
the evil of totalitarianism during the Stalinist years in the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn spent nearly half his life either in prison, in work camps, or in exile
for writing with honesty and a genuine willingness to stand for those ordinary
people in the works he created. After
being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he lived for a number of years in
the U.S. where he continued to turn out amazing literature before he was
finally able to return to Russia in 1994, where he lived out his days, dying in
his beloved Moscow in 2008.
Awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature” Solzhenitsyn gave this advice to writers willing to stand for social justice: “Own only what you can always carry with you; (and) know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
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