Part 7 of The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney

The final section of Solzhenitsyn's lecture, with some concluding thoughts from yours truly. 

Caravaggio's Narcissus

7.

However, I am encouraged and emboldened by the vital perception of world literature as the one great heart which beats for the concerns and misfortunes of our world, even though these are represented and visible in different separate ways in each of its corners.

    Beyond the age-old national literatures there existed from early times the concept of world literature -- viewed as a network of connecting lines joining the peaks of national literatures, and as the totality of reciprocal literary influences. But there used to be a time lag: readers and writers learned of writers in other languages only after delays that were sometimes ages long, so that mutual influences were also delayed, and world literature as a network of connection lines joining national literary peaks did not reach contemporaries, but their descendants only.

    But today there is a mutual reaction between the writers of one country and the readers and writers of another which if not immediate is at least close to it. I have felt it myself. My books, as yet unpublished in my own country, notwithstanding hasty and often poor translations swiftly found themselves responsive world readers. Even outstanding Western writers such as Heinrich Boll have undertaken critical analysis of them. And through all these last years, when my work and my freedom never quite collapsed and fell, when they remained suspended in air in violation of all the laws of gravity, seemingly on nothing at all -- on invisible, mute, public sympathy -- I learned with grateful warmth, quite unexpectedly, of the support also of the world brotherhood of writers. I was astounded when on my fiftieth birthday I received greetings from well-known European writers. No pressure brought on me went unnoticed any longer. In that day, so dangerous for me, of my expulsion from the Writers' Union, a wall of defense was erected by the outstanding writers of the world which saved me from worse persecutions, and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably readied a shelter for me in the event of the expulsion from my motherland which threatened me. And then, in the end, my nomination for the Nobel Prize itself was initiated, not in the country in which I live and write, but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. More than this, national writers' organizations expressed their unanimous support of me.

    And this was how I perceived and felt in my own case that world literature was not an abstraction, not something what had not yet crystallized, something created by the scholars of literature, but was a certain common body and common spirit, a living unity of the heart, in which the growing spiritual unity of humanity was expressed. And state boundaries are still being reddened by blood and heated by high-tension wires and by bursts of fire from automatic weapons, and certain ministries of internal affairs still imagine that literature, too, is an "internal affair" of the countries at their disposal, and newspaper headlines still read: "They do not have the right to interfere in our internal affairs!" Meanwhile there is no such thing left on our Earth as internal affairs. And the only salvation of humanity lies in everyone concerning himself with everything everywhere: the peoples of the East would then not be totally indifferent to what takes place in the West; and the peoples of the West would not be totally indifferent to what takes place in the East. Literature, one of the most delicate and responsive instruments of human existence, has been the first to take hold of, to assimilate, to seize upon this feeling of the growing unity of humanity. And so, today, I am appealing to world literature with conviction -- to hundreds of friends whom I have never met face to face and whom I perhaps never will see.

    Friends! If we are worth anything, let us try to help! In our own countries, torn asunder by the discord of parties, movements, castes, and groups, who is it who has from the earliest ages been a force not for disunity but for unity? This in essence is the position of the writers: the spokesmen for their national language -- the principal tie binding together a nation, binding together the very Earth occupied by a people, and in fortunate cases their national soul also.

    I think that world literature has it within its power in these frightening hours to help humanity know itself truly despite what prejudiced people and parties are attempting to instill; to communicate the condensed experience of one region to another in such a way that we will cease to be split apart and our eyes will no longer be dazzled, the units of measurement on our scales of values will correspond to one another, and some people may come to know the true history of others accurately and concisely and with that perception and pain they would feel if they had experienced it themselves -- and thus be protected from repeating the same errors. And at the same time we ourselves can perhaps develop within ourselves a world view: seeing with the center of the eye, like every human being, what is close, and with the edge of the eye registering what is happening in the rest of the world. And so we can bring world-wide standards into correlation and adhere to them. 

    And who, if not the writers, are to express condemnation not only of their own bankrupt rulers (and in some countries this is the easiest way of all to earn a living and everyone except those who are too lazy is occupied with it) but also of their own society, whether it be a matter of its craven humiliation or its complacent weakness, or the featherbrained escapades of youth, or young pirates brandishing knives? People will ask what literature can do in the face of the pitiless assault of open violence? Well, let us not forget that violence does not have its own separate existence and is, in fact, incapable of having it: it is invariably interwoven with the lie. They have the closest of kinship, the most profound natural tie: violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie, and the lie has nothing to stand on other than violence. Once someone has proclaimed violence as his method, he must inexorably select the lie as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself. But as soon as it is reinforced and its position is strengthened, it begins to sense the rarefied atmosphere around it, and it can go further only when fogged about with lies, cloaked in honeyed, hypocritical words. It does not always or invariable choke its victims; more often it demands of them only the oath of the lie, only participation in the lie.

    Simple is the ordinary courageous human being's act of not participating in the lie, of not supporting false actions! What his stand says is: "So be it that this takes place in the world, that it even reigns in the world -- but let it not be with my complicity." Writers and artists have a greater opportunity: to conquer the lie! In battle with the lie, art has always been victorious, always wins out, visibly, incontrovertibly for all! The lie can stand up and win out over much in the world -- but not over art.

    And as soon as the lie is dispersed, the repulsive nakedness of violence is exposed, and violence will collapse in impotence.

    And that is why my friends, I think that we are capable of helping the world in its white-hot hour of trial. We must not reconcile ourselves to being defenseless and disarmed; we must not sink into a heedless, feckless life -- but go out into the field of battle.

    In the Russian language there are some favorite proverbs on truth. They express enduringly the immense folk experience, and are sometimes quite surprising:

    ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WHOLE WORLD."

    And so it is that my own activity is founded on so apparently fantastic a violation of the law of conservation of energy and mass, as is my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

                                                                                                     

Solzhenitsyn's lecture on literature reinforces literary critic Northrop Frye's proposition that the arts, and literature in particular, are the expression of a social vision:

"...teachers should understand something of the practicality of literary training, at every stage of development. We begin by teaching children to read and write, on the ground that that is the most practical subject in the world, illiteracy being a problem on the same plane as starvation and exposure. But when we get to literature we tend to talk about it as though it were one of the ornaments of life, necessary for the best life, but a luxury for the ordinary one. It is essential for the teacher of literature, at every level, to remember that in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination. We often do not realize this until an actual event with some analogy to literary form takes place; but surely we do not need to wait for a president to be assassinated before we can understand what a tragedy is and what it can do in creating a community of response. Literature, however, gives us not only a means of understanding , but a power to fight. All around us is a society which demands that we adjust or come to terms with it, and what that society present to us is a social mythology. Advertising, propaganda, the speeches of politicians, popular books and magazines, the clichés of rumour, all have their own kind of pastoral myths, quest myths, hero myths, sacrificial myths, and nothing will drive these shoddy constructs out of the mind except the genuine forms of the same thing. We all know how important the reason is in an irrational world, but the imagination, in a society of perverted imagination, is far more essential in making us understand that the phantasmagoria of current events is not real society, but only the transient appearance of real society. Real society, the total body of what humanity has done and can do, is revealed to us only by the arts and sciences; nothing but the imagination can apprehend that reality as a whole, and nothing but literature, in a culture as verbal as ours, can train the imagination to fight for the sanity and the dignity of mankind."

Northrop Frye

'Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship'

The Stubborn Structure

Solzhenitsyn's call to fellow writers is to fight against the lie of the world's false systems of power by means of the imagination and write the Truth. "In battle with the lie," he says, "art has always been victorious, always wins out, visibly, incontrovertibly for all! The lie can stand up and win out over much in the world -- but not over art." 

This is a huge statement, and it is only true because art is always dealing in the realm of society's vision of the ideal. Art connects the events of time with transcendence. While self-expression of the artist is often a part - and sometimes a very large part - of art, there is always an element of the social and the expansive that moves it from diary entry to entry into the concerns of humanity. Art broadens, even if its focus seems on the surface to be narrow. The tale of one man's experience in the Gulag Archipelago is shared by millions. They have not been there themselves, but as they read, they unite with the writer and in that unity they are there in a real sense. The imagination has connected them, the work of the imagination from the artist and the reception and experience of his art by the public. In another essay, Frye writes:
...in proportion as one's loyalty stretches beyond one's nation to the whole human race, one's concrete and specific human relationships become more obvious. A new kind of society appears in the centre of the world, a society which is different for each man, but consists of those whom he can see and touch, those whom he influences and by whom he is influenced: a society, in short, of neighbors. Who is our neighbour? We remember that this question was asked of Jesus, who regarded it as a serious question, and told the story of the Good Samaritan to answer it. And, as the alien figure of the Samaritan, in a parable told to Jews, makes obvious, one's neighbour is not, or not necessarily, a member of the same social or racial or class group as oneself. One's neighbour is the person with whom one has been linked by some kind of creative human act, whether of mercy or charity, as in the parable itself; or by the intellect or the imagination, as with the teacher, scholar, or artist; or by love, whether spiritual or sexual. The society of neighbours, in this sense, is our real society; the society of all men, for who we feel tolerance and goodwill rather than love, is in its background."

'The Knowledge of Good and Evil'

This is why Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism can write,

"Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature give the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. (…) In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself: and am never more myself than when I do."

As an aside, I believe this is a way to tell Art from art, the Art that deserves a capital A and has lasting power -- Art that helps us transcend ourselves and our time and place and society in order to help us better see and participate in our time and place and society -- from the art that is only mere self-expression and shrinks those who spend time with it. This kind of art cuts us off from the world around us and makes us feel as if we are a world or an island in ourselves, that no one appreciates or understands the wonders contained within us. This art does not raise our eyes from our murky reflection to contemplate the sight, the beauties, the horrors of those around us. Narcissus was swallowed whole by his fascination with his own reflection. We are not so different. Our current obsession with representation in the arts turns what could be an experience of self-transcendence into a potentially obsessive consuming of the self until nothing is left. I don't think it's an accident that we have so much talk about identity in our society. We don't know who we are because we cannot see beyond our selfs. As Lewis so eloquently and precisely says, Literature helps us to "become a thousand men and yet remain myself." I become more myself when I move beyond myself.

Lewis in The Weight of Glory reinforces what Frye says above, that we are living in a society of neighbors. But Lewis lifts the veil even higher and helps us to see the eternal significance of living in a society of neighbors:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."

And most staggering, most sobering of all, Lewis says,
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Whether you think Lewis is overstating the point or not, I believe this statement of Lewis's is what Solzhenitsyn's lecture comes down to, that writers specifically, and Art more generally, can help us to sense the neighborliness of the world's nations, the familial connection of humanity; that writers, and especially writers of world literature, can even create these points of connection where no one else can. 

To quote Solzhenitsyn from the first section of this lecture:

"...all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends.

"Not all can be given names. Some of them go beyond words. Art opens even the chilled, darkened heart to high spiritual experience. Through the instrumentality of art we are sometimes sent -- vaguely, briefly -- insights which logical processes of thought cannot attain. 

"Like the tiny mirror of the fairy tale: you look into it and you see -- not yourself -- but for one fleeting moment the Unattainable to which you cannot leap or fly. And the heart aches..."