"And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go — then imprisonment begins to tr… - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go — then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you. And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings. Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you — and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels — patience. You are acending... Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness — and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending... With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief. For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going to be. And you also have to work out — what is gladness and what is grief. And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the Christian s
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn [Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын] (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian philosopher, novelist, dramatist and historian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning to Russia in 1994.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Bert Verhoeff for Anefo (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Native Name:
Александр Исаевич Солженицын
Alternative Names:
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
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Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
"The days rolled by in the camp — they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second."
are there really people on this earth who deliberately set out to do evil things? Who say to themselves, I want to hurt people, to inflict all the pain I can, to make their lives impossible?
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If only it were all so simple! 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?
