Alexander Solzhenitsyn, voice of the gulag
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89 was not only a great, but a passionately committed writer – he believed it was his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia’s 20th-century experience for posterity.
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Despite the ban imposed on all his works after the publication of his masterly A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), he was very widely read – in photocopied samizdat form – in his native Russia. He was also the only Russian writer to achieve the best-seller lists in the West, and sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages.
Not that fame or fortune held much temptation for Solzhenitsyn. A big, loose-limbed figure, with an awesome Old Testament visage and booming voice, he was a fundamentally serious, ascetic individual, even something of a masochist, who distinguished himself, even among his long-suffering compatriots, with his capacity for enduring emotional and physical pain.
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of those exceptional figures who had a message, a story to tell. Domineering and self-righteous, he was none the less a remarkable human being, a visionary, a crusader in the simplest sense, who was steered in his writing, as in his actions, by a deep sense of justice.
There can be little doubt that he was one of the writers whom the grand old man of Russian letters, Konstantin Paustovsky, had in mind when he said:
“They see the truth and they write the truth. Therefore their books survive. they live and they will go on living and there is no need to worry about the fate of their books.”
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solzhenitsyn tem o pendor poderoso de nos lembrar que em tempos de ditadura só os maiores falam de liberdade.
Comentário por ferro — Agosto 5, 2008 @ 17:01
“solzhenitsyn tem o pendor poderoso de nos lembrar” … de muitas coisas
“Democracy cannot be imposed from above, by clever laws or wise politicians. It must not be forced [on people] like a cap. Democracy can only grow upwards, like a plant. Democracy must begin at the local level, within the local self-government.”
“‘Democracy is not worth a brass farthing if it is being installed by bayonets.’
“The U.S. has a strange idea of democracy, they first interfered with the Bosnian situation, bombed Yugoslavia, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Who is next? Perhaps Iran?”
“There is this belief, that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”
Comentário por CN — Agosto 5, 2008 @ 18:03
exactamente o que pensava
Comentário por ferro — Agosto 6, 2008 @ 19:00