Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Freedom, Heart

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

• Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Generations, Literature

• The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Literature, Substitutes

• I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Education, Hygiene, Forever

  "The Oak and the Calf". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1980.

• Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Literature, Nations

• Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Time, Air, Names

• Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Grief, Our World

• I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Writing, Responsibility, Thinking

  "The Exile Returns" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. February 14, 1994.

• The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Differences, Two

  "Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Art —for Man's Sake: I", www.nytimes.com. September 30, 1972.

• Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Soul, Together, Literature

• Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Memories, Heart

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

• Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Fundamentals, Literature, Significant

  Source: www.independent.co.uk

• Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Pain, People, Literature

  Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967) as translated in "Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record" edited by Leopold Labedz, "The Struggle Intensifies", 1970.

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