Dostoevsky’s Vision
Forty years before, Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims….if Dostoevsky erred, it was on the side of understatement: from 1917 to 1959, socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!…
Tag: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Today’s One-Liner (#319)
Courage and victory come to us only when we resolve to make sacrifices. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, We Have Ceased To See the Purpose: Essential Speeches, 20
Warning
Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…
Today’s One-Liner (#301)
Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…
Today’s One-Liner (#291)
In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…
Today’s One-Liner (#55)
The meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, First Things, August/September 2024, p. 70,