Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and its totalitarianism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward, August 1914, and The Gulag...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 December 1918
CityKislovodsk, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes about
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.
... but it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!
... mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction.
... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.
Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.
All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.
Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.
Not all of me shall die.
The heart senses who is friend and who is no friend.
We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.
An engineer cannot participate in irrationality ...
Once the fight is on-strike quickly and often.
Which of us can control his feelings?