Nobel archives reveal judges’ safety fears for Solzhenitsyn

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“Newly opened archives at the Swedish Academy have revealed the depth of concern among Nobel judges for the consequences awaiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn if the dissident Soviet writer were awarded the prize for literature in 1970.

The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who revealed the horrors of Stalin’s gulags in his writings and was eventually exiled by the Soviet Union, was named the Nobel laureate that year, lauded by the committee for “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”.

But archives at the Swedish Academy, which are sealed for 50 years after each laureate is named, have revealed the fierce debate among the judges over what a win might mean for Solzhenitsyn.”

[Read on at the Guardian website]

Soviet Tyranny Warmed Over Is Still Tyranny

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Over at American Thinker, E. M. Cadwaladr reads The Gulag Archipelago and worries about politics in today’s America as an end-all.

“In short, the grandest and most chilling similarity between Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union and today’s America is this: the needs of the political narrative reign supreme. Facts have been dethroned. In our old republic, policies were usually the result of compromises. They balanced, however imperfectly, the natural interests of a competing real persons. In a totalitarian state, the collective populace is simply forced into the mold required by the needs of the ideology itself. The idea justifies both means and ends. What happens to the individual matters — and in fact is worth mentioning — only if it happens to advance the progress of the narrative. Truth, as the postmodernists have openly told us, is what authorities say it is. In such a world, you and I are nothing at all.”
— E. M. Cadwaladr