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"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
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About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
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
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Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...
We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. 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. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.
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