Hamêd’s Reviews > The Nobel Lecture on Literature > Status Update

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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principal and is concidered the virtue of orthodoxy.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One day Dastoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beatuy will save the world".... How could that be possible?.... There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn / The Nobel Lecture On Literature

It is we who shall die __ art will remain... 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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn / The Nobel Lecture On Literature