'It's the living memory of nations'

 

“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 Russia on this date 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.  The books are both Classics and classes in great writing that unfold in the conversations and images around the horrors facing ordinary people who dared to confront the evils of totalitarianism. 

Solzhenitsyn spent nearly half his life in prison, work camps, or exile for his 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 until  he returned to Russia in 1994, where he lived out his days. He died in 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 had this advice for 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.”