"One Word of Truth

For the past two years, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living writer, has been prevented from delivering the lecture that Nobel prizewinners customarily give. In 1970, when he won the award, Soviet officials forbade him to travel to Sweden for the solemn ceremony. Gunnar Jarring, Sweden's ambassador to Moscow, refused to transmit Solzhenitsyn's manuscript to Stockholm by diplomatic pouch. Last week the long-awaited lecture finally appeared in the yearbook of the Nobel Foundation, which did not disclose how it had been obtained.

The lecture was supremely worth waiting for. The persecuted author, who has spent eleven years in Stalinist prisons and in exile, mourns his fellow Russian writers who died in concentration camps. Solzhenitsyn writes: "In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read...I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps but hundreds and even thousands of them--steep, unyielding, frozen steps leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others--perhaps with greater gifts and more strength than I--have perished...As I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, head bowed, allowing others to pass ahead of me to this place--as I stand here, how am I to divine what they would have wished to say?" Quoting from the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, Solzhenitsyn thus defines his obligation to bear witness for the dead: "Even in chains we must complete that circle which the gods have inscribed for us."

He continues: "Literature is the living memory of a nation. It preserves and kindles within itself the flame of a country's spent history, in a form that is safe from distortion and slander. In this way, literature, together with language, protects the soul of a nation. But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation of 'freedom to publish'; it is the stopping of the heart of a nation, a laceration of its memory." When writers, as in Russia, are "condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation...and sometimes a danger to the whole of mankind."

Solzhenitsyn castigates the West as well as the Soviet Union for the untrammeled violence that he sees "brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world." He cites the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, "when tanks flooded the streets of a foreign capital with blood" and "hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and conflagrations" in the West as actions by the forces of evil "that are determined to convulse and destroy civilization." He warns: "And they may well succeed."

Solzhenitsyn bitterly criticizes those in the West who pursue prosperity and material wellbeing, comfortably ignoring "all the groans, the stifled cries, the destroyed lives" as long as these remain at a distance. He characterizes the United Nations as an "immoral organization in an immoral world," which "jealously guards the freedom of some nations" while neglecting private appeals by "plain humble individuals." In an evident allusion to the West's present efforts at detente with the Soviet Union, which he compares with acquiescence to Hitler at Munich in 1938, he writes: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barbarity, except concessions and smiles."

In his otherwise deeply pessimistic statement, Solzhenitsyn suggests that world literature has the power to help mankind. In a passage that concludes one of the most eloquent appeals to conscience in 20th century letters, Solzhenitsyn poses this question: "What can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. 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...But writers and artists can achieve more: they can conquer the lie. In the struggle with falsehood, art has always won and always will win! One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

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