We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ignat Solzhenitsyn (editor)

This collection brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.

Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide—forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West—and searching for humanity’s possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and—perhaps most centrally—the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.

These annotated speeches, including the timeless Nobel Lecture and Harvard Address, have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn’s sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn’s life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Essays

228 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2025

About the author

also known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.

This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.

Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...

Reviews

[Terry McCord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scathing speeches on the brutality, oppression he experienced. And the lack of will he sees in response to what Russians lived with, while the West pursues self-interests. What an amazing soul.

[Dennis R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost everyone has heard of Solzhenitsyn's famous story of his time in the Gulag Archipelago. In fact, the title has become a common word now to describe any penal system which cheapens the message in the original work. Most people are unaware of the speeches Solzhenitsyn gave in the years following his release from prison and banishment from Russia.

While he was suffering in prison, he never lost sight of what was important and never lost hope that his Mother Russia would be liberated and become a nation of free people. He never lost and in fact his privation deepened his religious faith in the face of state atheism. Like Viktor Frankl his privation allowed him to distill the essential concepts that makes us human and allow for culture to flourish.

In this collection of speeches including his famous commencement address at Harvard he shows himself to be a prophet of great prescience and his analysis of the ills of the West have been proven true in the passage of the years.
It is said that no prophet is respected in his own time and while some took Solzhenitsyn's warning to heart most passed them by much to our shame. Today, generations have come of age with no concept of the cultural sinews of the nations of the West, instead they have been inculcated in the tired and defeated dogma of Marx and are too blind to see that the path they are on will lead directly to the Gulag.
Solzhenitsyn's speeches deserve to be read and studied as warnings to humanity to correct its path before all that was glorious and wonderful in Western culture is destroyed because we have ceased to see the purpose of our existence.

[Flash Sheridan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don’t need an electronic version of Solzhenitsyn, see also The Solzhenitsyn Reader; only four out of ten of these speeches are not also there:

• An Orbital Journey (1974)
• If One Doesn’t Wish to Be Blind (1976)
• The Shallowing of Freedom (1976)
• The Depletion of Culture (1997)

I don’t feel qualified to review the content of these speeches (“We don’t judge the great books, the great books judge us.” — Harvard Knowles), and my Russian is not good enough to compare the two translations for accuracy; but the newer ones here are not as well edited as in The Solzhenitsyn Reader. E.g., poor usage of “refuted” about a George Bernard Shaw quotation (23% of the Kindle version) and “Englishlanguage” as a run-on word at 66%.

[Connie]

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[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it and weep.