Post by vulcan13 on Aug 16, 2008 17:00:33 GMT -8
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
Shulubin, in Cancer Ward (1968) Pt. 2, Ch. 10
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.
Autobiographical sketch (1970), at Nobelprize.org
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.
"Peace and Violence" (1973)
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
--The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
--As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974)
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
--BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener (15 February 1979)
At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
---"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999)
The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.
---"How We Must Rebuild Russia" in Komsomolskaya Pravda (18 September 1990)
[glow=red,2,300]One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)[/glow]
Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.
----Kuziomin, in the Ralph Parker translation (1963).
Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
Next, he removed his cap from his shaven head—however cold it was, he wouldn't let himself eat with his cap on—and stirred up his skilly, quickly checking what had found its way into his bowl.
Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without a trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like. Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.
“Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government.”
“Come on, boys, don't let it get you down! It's only a Power Station, but we'll make it a home away from home.”
His mind and his eyes were studying the wall, the façade of the Power Station, two cinder blocks thick, as it showed from under the ice. Whoever had been laying there before was either a bungler or a slacker. Shukhov would get to know every inch of that wall as if he owned it.
Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at the search point. He'd earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he'd bought his tobacco.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.
The three extra days were for leap years.
[glow=red,2,300]The First Circle [/glow]
You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.
---Bobynin, in Ch. 17
For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
---Innokenty, in Ch. 57
Variant translation: For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Unsourced
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
History has in different questions laid out some tremendous turnabouts and curves.
I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out — most importantly in the spiritual sense.
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world."
---The second statement of this quote is a variant of what he calls a Russian proverb in his Nobel lecture of 1970.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Russians are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way.
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within
the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life.
The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.
The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
This book is an agglomeration of lean-tos and annexes and there is no knowing how big the next addition will be, or where it will be put. At any point, I can call the book finished or unfinished.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
When you come to think of it, a blizzard is no use to anybody.
Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them.
--Referring to the Soviet government.
After flinging away the United Nations Organization, after trampling its charters, NATO is ruling the world and for the next century we will have an ancient law - those with power will unconditionally right... Before the eyes of humanity a beautiful European country is being destroyed, while civilized governments are applauding. Meanwhile, despaired people, leaving bomb shelters, form human shields to protect Danube bridges... This is the world we are offered to live in from now on.
I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
Shulubin, in Cancer Ward (1968) Pt. 2, Ch. 10
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.
Autobiographical sketch (1970), at Nobelprize.org
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.
"Peace and Violence" (1973)
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
--The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
--As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974)
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
--BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener (15 February 1979)
At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
---"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999)
The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.
---"How We Must Rebuild Russia" in Komsomolskaya Pravda (18 September 1990)
[glow=red,2,300]One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)[/glow]
Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.
----Kuziomin, in the Ralph Parker translation (1963).
Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
Next, he removed his cap from his shaven head—however cold it was, he wouldn't let himself eat with his cap on—and stirred up his skilly, quickly checking what had found its way into his bowl.
Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without a trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like. Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.
“Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government.”
“Come on, boys, don't let it get you down! It's only a Power Station, but we'll make it a home away from home.”
His mind and his eyes were studying the wall, the façade of the Power Station, two cinder blocks thick, as it showed from under the ice. Whoever had been laying there before was either a bungler or a slacker. Shukhov would get to know every inch of that wall as if he owned it.
Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at the search point. He'd earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he'd bought his tobacco.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.
The three extra days were for leap years.
[glow=red,2,300]The First Circle [/glow]
You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.
---Bobynin, in Ch. 17
For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
---Innokenty, in Ch. 57
Variant translation: For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Unsourced
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
History has in different questions laid out some tremendous turnabouts and curves.
I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out — most importantly in the spiritual sense.
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world."
---The second statement of this quote is a variant of what he calls a Russian proverb in his Nobel lecture of 1970.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Russians are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way.
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within
the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life.
The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.
The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
This book is an agglomeration of lean-tos and annexes and there is no knowing how big the next addition will be, or where it will be put. At any point, I can call the book finished or unfinished.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
When you come to think of it, a blizzard is no use to anybody.
Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them.
--Referring to the Soviet government.
After flinging away the United Nations Organization, after trampling its charters, NATO is ruling the world and for the next century we will have an ancient law - those with power will unconditionally right... Before the eyes of humanity a beautiful European country is being destroyed, while civilized governments are applauding. Meanwhile, despaired people, leaving bomb shelters, form human shields to protect Danube bridges... This is the world we are offered to live in from now on.
