Chapter 5 of The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney

 

5

But just who is going to coordinate these scales of values, and how is it to be done? Who is going to create for all humanity one single unitary system of evaluation -- for evil deeds and good deeds, for what is intolerable and what is tolerable, and where the boundary between them lies today?  Who is going to clarify for all humanity what is genuinely heinous and unbearable and what merely scrapes our skin because of its proximity -- and thereby direct our wrath against what is really the most terrible, not against what is merely the nearest? Just who is there who might be able to communicate such an understanding through the barriers of personal human experience? Who is there who might possibly be able to instill in the bigoted narrow, stubborn human essence the grief and joy of those faraway others, the perception of a range of facts and delusions never personally experienced? 

    In this area propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are all powerless. But fortunately there does exist in the world a means to this end! It is art. It is literature.

    A miracle is within its power: to overcome the human being's liability of learning only from personal experience, so that the experience of others bypasses him with no effect. From human being to human being, filling up their brief time on earth, art communicates entire the freight of someone else's long life-experience, with all its burdens, colors, juices, recreating the experience endured by another human being in the flesh -- permitting it to be absorbed and made one's own as if it actually had been.

    And even more, much more, than this: whole countries and continents repeat each other's mistakes after a while; it can happen even now, in an age when, it would seem, everything is clearly visible and obvious! No indeed: what some peoples have already suffered, considered, and rejected suddenly turns up among others as the last and newest word. And here, too, the one and only substitute for experience we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: to be able to communicate despite differences in languages, customs, and social structures the life-experience of one whole nation to another whole nation -- to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second nation has never experienced at all. And in the most favorable case this may save a whole nation from a path which is unnecessary, or mistaken, or even fatal. And in this way the twistings and windings of human history are lessened.

    I wish today from this Nobel Lecture platform to call insistent attention to this great and blessed faculty of art.

    There is one other invaluable way in which literature communicates irrefutable and condensed human experience -- from generation to generation. In this way it becomes the living memory of nations. In this way it keeps warm and preserves within itself its lost history in a way not subject to distortion and falsification. Thus literature, along with language, preserves the national soul.

    (In recent times there has been much talk of the leveling of nations, of the disappearance of peoples in the caldron or contemporary civilization. I do agree with this, but discussion of this point is a separate matter. At this juncture it is merely appropriate to say that the disappearance of nationalities would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, to possess one single, identical personality, one identical face. Nationalities are the wealth of humanity; they are its crystallized personalities; even the smallest among them has its own special coloration, hides within itself a particular facet of God's design.)

    But woe to that nationality whose literature is cut short by forcible interference. This is no mere simple violation of "freedom of the press." This is a closing, a locking up, of the national heart, amputation of the national memory. That nationality has no memory of its own self. It is deprived of its spiritual unity. And even though compatriots apparently speak the same language, they suddenly cease to understand one another. Whole speechless generation are born and die off who do not tell each other about themselves, nor speak about themselves to their descendants. If such literary geniuses as Akhmatova and Zamyatin are immured alive throughout their lifetimes, condemned right up to the grave to create in silence, without hearing a reverberation from what they have written, this is not only their own personal misfortune but a sorrow for all nationalities, and a danger for all nations.

    And, in certain cases, for all humanity as well: that is, when, as a result of such silence, the whole of HISTORY ceases to be understood.