Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Literature Quotes

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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less … than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn