Solzhenitsyn’s Important Words on Literature

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Undelivered Words

Two years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the author published a courageous acceptance speech.

By William Shawn

Photograph from Keystone / Getty

The most important political words of the last week or two have come not from President Nixon or Senator McGovern but from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose undelivered speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 has just been published in Sweden by the Nobel Foundation. 

Over here, parts of the speech were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, to both of which we are grateful. Solzhenitsyn spoke for no one political party, for no one people, for no one nation; he spoke for himself, and for us all. With a depth of feeling and an eloquence that are awesome, he spoke about the place of literature in a nation’s life. “Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power,” he wrote. “

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.” Living in a country whose government tries to control the written word and the spoken word in all their manifestations, he dared to say, “Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory: Within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, [or] to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the earth but by an expeditionary corps from Mars: The people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the earth and are prepared to trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as ‘liberators.’ ” 

And he went on, “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, “Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.” And, finally, “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” Solzhenitsyn’s words constitute a political act of vast courage. They transform the landscape. They will linger in the air. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the September 9, 1972, issue, with the headline “Notes and Comment.”