‘One word of Truth…’ the Nobel Speech on Literature 1970 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Bodley Head, 1972 27 pages ISBN 0 370 104 919
also available on the internet – look for Nobel Prizes
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) ends his Nobel Prize speech with these words – ‘In Russian the most popular proverbs are about truth. They express the not inconsiderable and bitter experience of the people, sometimes with astonishing force –
One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
and on such a fantastic breach of the law of conservation of mass and energy are based my own activities and my appeal to the writers of the world.’ We must be grateful to the members of the BBC Russian service who have served Solzhenitsyn and the general public so well in making his Nobel speech available to us in English. The burden of this acceptance speech is the enduring nature of Art, literature in particular. Art outlasts human existence. While it reflects human life in many ways, it may also transcend human experience.
While not overlooking the inner struggles of the artist’s creative spirit, the burden of Solzhenitsyn’s concern in this speech is the often uncomfortable and fractious relation between the artist and the prevailing culture, especially that of a political hue.
Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in Soviet Russia is ample testimony to the troubled and troublesome aspect to this ineradicable part of his life.
There are plenty of other instances of artists in an unforgiving, harsh and strident political culture – Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, for example.
The difficulties faced by the artist may be made even more difficult when the prevailing regime harnesses art, in all its forms, to its own political agenda – both Stalin and Hitler were prime cases of this misuse of art.
Against the background of of Solzhenitsyn’s suffering at the hands of his political masters and his undoubted success in creating works of literary excellence, his words as a committed Christian at the culmination of his inspiring acceptance speech bear repeating –
‘one word of truth outweighs the whole world.’