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Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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In the First Circle

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Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist, was born on December 11, 1918, and died on August 3, 2008. He is renowned for his works that profoundly exposed the dark side of the Soviet political system and is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. more

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“I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”

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“There are some who write for human praise, by means of the noble qualities of the heart that their imagination invents, or that they may have. Me, I use my genius to portray the delights of cruelty! Not momentary, artificial delights; but ones that started with man, and will finish with him. Cannot genius ally itself with cruelty in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or, because one is cruel, can't one have genius? The proof is in my words; all you have to do is listen to me, if you want to... Excuse me, it seemed that my hair was standing upright on my head.”

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Book:Les Chants de Maldoror
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“how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart - or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So a thick curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded - the vast and multitudinous line of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds.”

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Book:Confessions of an English Opium Eater
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“Los Gingantes [] no se matan entre sí [] ni los gatos matan a los gatos -matan a los ratones- señaló Sofía, [] los guisantes humanos son los únicos que se matan entre sí. [] Los guisantes humanos se aplastan entre ellos sin cesar , se disparan cañones y montan en aerioplanos para arrojarse bombas en la cabeza. [] ¡Los guisantes humanos no dejan de asesinar a otros guisantes humanos! [] (Sofía) empezaba a preguntarse si los humanos eran mejores que los gigantes.”

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“There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. I am tenderhearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now. I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other, clicking open the breech to re-load, snapping it to again, while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so.”

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“But the mighty course of human destinies proceeds: like the change of season, with measured pace: great designs ripen slowly; stealthily and hesitantly the dark suggestions of deadly malice quit the abysses of mind for the light of day. and, as Horace, with equal truth and beauty observes, "the flying criminal is only followed limpingly by penal retribution.”

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Book:Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
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