Tag Archives: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Step back from that gangrenous edge.

history, humanity, quotes, , , , ,

To commemorate the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 3, 2008, this year I give you a link to his essay, “Live Not by Lies,” with an introduction to it, and excerpt from it. The website of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center has a wealth of the author’s writings and speeches, a list of events and publications related to his legacy, his biography, and more. They have put up a new page dedicated to excerpts of his writings over the course of almost forty years on the topic of Ukraine, beginning with, “Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts.” First the introduction to the essay:

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.

— by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, The Solzhenitsyn Reader

Here is one short excerpt from the essay:

“Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It won’t take long to read the whole essay here: “Live Not by Lies.”

Intersecting losses make a harbinger.

books, history, quotes, , ,

Five speeches that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave  in the U.S. and in Britain in 1975 and 1976 make the book, Warning to the West. Today I sat on a log at the beach and got on with reading this collection that I’d started before Christmas; a while later I sat in my car overlooking the ocean and finished it.

It’s a nice little book, if you’d like a taste of Solzhenitsyn but don’t feel up to tackling one of his novels or The Gulag Archipelago. He said he prefers to write, but his speeches are powerful, and complement his writings. Taken altogether, these talks present a lot of history “from the inside,” and the perspective of someone whose analysis is based on thorough knowledge. His unique vantage point combines with true wisdom.

In different striking and blunt words to different groups, such as U.S. legislators and BBC listeners, he gives his prophetic message. While he uses details of events that were then recent history to make his points to his audience at the time, the heart of his concerns is ever pertinent and enduring.

“There is a German proverb which runs Mut verloren — alles verloren. ‘When courage is lost, all is lost.’ There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both these losses — the loss of courage and the loss of reason — intersect? This is the picture which I found the West presents today.”

-Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn, 1976

At the heart of their psychology.

philosophy, quotes, religion, , , , , ,

“It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that ‘revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.’ That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Elm Log

nature, poetry, trees,

THE ELM LOG

“We were sawing firewood when we picked up an elm log and gave a cry of amazement. It was a full year since we had chopped down the trunk, dragged it along behind a tractor and sawn it up into logs, which we had then thrown on to barges and wagons, rolled into stacks and piled up on the ground – and yet this elm log had still not given up! A fresh green shoot had sprouted from it with a promise of a thick, leafy branch, or even a whole new elm tree.

“We placed the log on the sawing-horse, as though on an executioner’s block, but we could not bring ourselves to bite into it with our saw. How could we? That log cherished life as dearly as we did; indeed, its urge to live was even stronger than ours.”

― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems