7
However, I am cheered by a vital awareness of world literature as of a single huge heart, beating out the cares and troubles of our world, albeit presented and perceived differently in each of its corners. Apart from age-old national literatures there existed, even in past ages, the conception of world literature as an anthology skirting the heights of the national literatures, and as the sum total of mutual literary influences. But there occurred a lapse in time: readers and writers became acquainted with writers of other tongues only after a time lapse, sometimes lasting centuries, so that mutual influences were also delayed and the anthology of national literary heights was revealed only in the eyes of descendants, not of contemporaries. But today, between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another, there is a reciprocity if not instantaneous then almost so. I experience this with myself. Those of my books which, alas, have not been printed in my own country have soon found a responsive, worldwide audience, despite hurried and often bad translations. Such distinguished western writers as Heinrich Böll have undertaken critical analysis of them. All these last years, when my work and freedom have not come crashing down, when contrary to the laws of gravity they have hung suspended as though on air, as though on nothing—on the invisible dumb tension of a sympathetic public membrane; then it was with grateful warmth, and quite unexpectedly for myself, that I learnt of the further support of the international brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astonished to receive congratulations from well-known western writers. No pressure on me came to pass by unnoticed. During my dangerous weeks of exclusion from the Writers’ Union, the wall of defense advanced by the world’s prominent writers protected me from worse persecutions; and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared a roof for me, in the event of my threatened exile being put into effect. Finally even the advancement of my name for the Nobel Prize was raised not in the country where I live and write, but by François Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still entire national writers’ unions have expressed their support for me. Thus I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an “internal affair” falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: “No right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Whereas there are no internal affairs left on our crowded Earth! And mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today—to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see. Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language—the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit. I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the whole world: in the center observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.
And who, if not writers, are to pass judgment—not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one’s bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfied weakness? Who is to pass judgment on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives? We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood. And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let that enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can conquer falsehood! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall. That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life—but by going to war! Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation
Read On
More from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
IN THE FIRST CIRCLE
* * *
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police accept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country’s brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller’s identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin’s repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.
First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn’s fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author’s most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn’s powerful and magnificent classic.
“Solzhenitsyn’s best novel.”
—Washington Post
“A classic. . . . Future generations
will read it with wonder and awe.”
—New York Times
“So profound in its vision and its implications that it transcends both its locale and the specificities of its subject matter.”
—New Republic
THE THRILLING COLD WAR MASTERWORK, PUBLISHED IN FULL FOR THE FIRST TIME
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, ABRIDGED
* * *
“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century. Not only did Solzhenitsyn deliver the historical truth of the Gulag, he conveyed, as no one else did, its demonic atmosphere and the psychology of both the prisoners and the guards, as well as the mark it left on the entire society.”
—David Remnick, The New Yorker
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, VOLUME 2
* * *
“Volume Two is concerned with the daily life and death of the prisoners, among whom Solzhenitsyn spent eight years. . . . [P]assionate and sharply ironic. . . . Both a powerful chronicle of brutal abuses and at the same time a testament to the tensile strength of the human spirit.”
—Newsweek
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, VOLUME 3
* * *
“[An] enthralling record of camp uprisings, of escapes, of defiance by individuals and groups of victims. . . . In poignant closing chapters, [Solzhenitsyn] recalls his own resurrection from the house of the dead.”
—New Yorker
Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Fiction
In the First Circle
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Cancer Ward
Stories and Prose Poems
August 1914 (The Red Wheel: Knot I)
November 1916 (The Red Wheel: Knot II)
Nonfiction
Nobel Lecture
Letter to the Soviet Leaders
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956
From Under the Rubble
Warning to the West
A World Split Apart
The Oak and the Calf
The Mortal Danger
Rebuilding Russia
Invisible Allies
“The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century
Poetry
Prussian Nights: A Poem
Drama
The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play
Candle in the Wind
Prisoners: A Tragedy
Victory Celebrations: A Comedy in Four Acts
Copyright
Portions of this work previously appeared in the New York Times.
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1918-1956 (VOLUME 1). Copyright © 1973 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. English language translation copyright © 1973, 1974 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Foreword copyright © 2007 by Anne Applebaum. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
P.S. ™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers.
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1976 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
First HarperPerennial edition published 1991.
Reissued in Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2007.
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-294163-3
Version 08272020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-125371-3
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The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 79
