The Nobel Foundation 1972 Translation by the members of the BBC Russian Service. Copyright BBC 1972 ISBN 0 370 70491 9 Printed and bound in Great Britain for The Bodley Head Ltd. 9, Bow Street, London WC2 7AI, by The Stellar Press Ltd, Hatfield, Herts. First published 1972 Eighth impression 1974 As the savage, confronted with a strange object, asks himself, "Was it cast up by the ocean? Has it been long buried in the sand? Did it fall from the sky?" - an intricately curved object, reflecting the light now dimly, now with flashing brilliance - turns it this way and that in bewilderment, twists it, tries to adapt it to some purpose, seeks to find some lowly acceptable use for it, never suspecting its higher purpose, so we too, holding Art in our hands, conceitedly deem ourselves its masters. We boldly direct, renew, reform and proclaim it, sell it for money, flatter the powerful with it, employ it sometimes for entertainment - even for popular songs and nightclub revues; sometimes we use it as a stop-gap or a weapon for transitory political and limited social needs. But Art is not sullied by our efforts; it loses nothing of its lineage, but every time and however applied it grants us a share of its own secret, inner light. But can we encompass the whole of that light? Who can dare to say that he has defined Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps some have understood and named them all in ages past, but even then we would not stay contemplating it for long: we listened, and scorned it, and immediately tossed it aside, as we always hasten to change everything, even the best - so long as it be for something new l And when someone tells us an old truth again, it never even occurs to us that we have already known it earlier. One artist imagines himself to be the creator of an independent spiritual world, burdens himself with the act of creating and peopling this world, accepts complete responsibility for it but he breaks down, because no mortal genius is capable of withstanding such a burden; just as, in a more general ense, man, who has declared himself to be the centre of existence, has been unable to create a balanced spiritual system. And if he is overwhelmed by failure, he lays the blame on the eternal disharmony of the world, on the complexity of the distraught contemporary soul, or on the lack of comprehension of the public. Another artist knows there is a higher power over him and will work joyfully as a small apprentice under God's heaven, although his responsibility for everything he paints and draws, and for the souls who apprehend it, is even greater. But on the other hand this world was not created by him, is not uled by him, there are no doubts about its fundamental principles; this artist has only the gift of perceiving more acutely than others the harmony of the world and the beauty and ugliness of man's contribution to it, and the gift of acutely conveying this to others. In failure and even in the lowest depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness, the consciousness of this steadfast harmony cannot forsake him. However, the whole irrationality of Art, its dazzling convolutions, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on people are too magical to be plumbed by an artist's philosophy or scheme of things or by the labour of his unworthy hands. Archaeologists have never discovered any early stages of man's development when he had no art. In the pre-dawn twilight of mankind we received it from Hands we were unable to see. And we had no chance to ask, "Why give us this gift? How are we to use it?" They were wrong, and they will always be wrong, those prophets who say Art will degenerate, will exhaust all conceivable forms, will die. It is we who will die; Art will remain. And shall we, before we perish, manage to understand all its facets and all its purposes ? Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words. Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. Through Art we are sometimes sent - indistinctly, briefly - revelations not to be achieved by rational thought. It is like that small mirror in the fairy tales: you glance in it, and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it . . . Dostoevsky once mysteriously remarked, "The world will be saved by Beauty". What does that mean? For a long time I thought it was just a phrase. How could it be possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did Beauty save whom from what? Beauty has ennobled and elevated, yes, but whom has it ever saved? However, there is this peculiarity in the essence of Beauty, this peculiarity in the situation of Art: the genuinely artistic work is utterly, irrefutably convincing, and even the resisting heart surrenders to it. A political speech, a piece of assertive propaganda, a plan for a new society, or a philosophical system can all be built with apparent harmony and consistency even on an error, on a lie; and what has been hidden or distorted will not be immediately apparent. And then a diametrically opposite speech, piece of propaganda or plan, a differently constructed philosophy, may emerge looking just as smooth and consistent, with no visible flaw. That is why they inspire trust - and distrust too. It is useless to assert what one's heart does not believe. A work of art carries its proof in itself. Artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the image-test; all such concepts crumble, they are revealed as puny and colourless, they convince nobody. But works which have drawn on truth and presented it to us in live, concentrated form, grip us and communicate themselves to us compellingly - and nobody, even centuries later, will ever be able to refute them. Could it be that the old trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not just a well-worn cliche to be trotted out on official occasions, as it appeared to us in the days of our conceited materialist youth ? If the tops of these three trees merge, as the sages of old used to say, but the too obvious, too straight shoots of Truth and Goodness are choked, felled, suppressed - then may not perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected shoots of Beauty fight their way through and soar up to the _same place_, and thus achieve the task of all three? And in that case will not Dostoevsky's words, " The world will be saved by Beauty", turn out to be no slip of the tongue, but a prophecy? For he was granted extraordinary vision, he was amazingly inspired. And then perhaps art and literature will really be able to help the modern world. Here today I shall attempt to expound what little knowledge I have managed, over the years, to glean with regard to this problem. I have mounted this platform from which the Nobel Lecture is delivered - a platform made available to by no means every writer and that only once in his lifetime - not by means of three or four well-carpeted steps, but by climbing up hundreds, even thousands of steps, unyielding, steep, slippery wit frost, steps leading up from the darkness and cold where fate decreed that I should survive, while others perhaps more gifted and stronger than I - perished. Of those who perished, I myself met only a few in the Gulag Archipelago,* a scattered, fragmented multitude of islands; under the millstone of surveillance and mistrust I could not speak freely with everybody, some I only heard about, others I only guessed at. Those who already had a literary reputation when they sank into that abyss are at least known - but how many died ("Gulag" signifies the State Prison Camp Administration), totally unknown, never once publicly named And hardly any of them have ever returned. A whole national literature has been left there, buried without a coffin, without even any underclothes, naked, just a name-tag tied round one toe. Russian literature continued its uninterrupted flow, while from outside it appeared a desert. Where a healthy forest might have grown, after all the felling nothing remains but a couple of trees overlooked by accident. And how am I today, accompanied as I am by the shadows of the fallen, bowing my head as I stand aside to let those other men who deserved this honour before me take their place on this platform - how am I today to guess and put into words what they would have wanted to say? This obligation has long lain heavy on us, and we have long known it. In the words of Vladimir Solovyov But e'en in chains ourselves we must complete That circle which the gods have fore-ordained. During the painful marches of our camp life, in the convicts' column, in the mist of the evening frosts with the strings of lights shining through, the words we would have shouted for the whole world to hear, had the world been able to hear a single one of us, often rose to our throats. At that time it seemed self-evident what our lucky ambassador to the world outside would say, and how the world would immediately respond in sympathy. Our field of vision was peopled with distinct physical objects and distinct spiritual forces, and in an unambiguous world we saw nothing to counteract them. Those thoughts did not originate in books, they were not selected for their attractiveness: they were born in prison cells and by camp-fires in the forest, in conversation with people now dead; they have stood the test of that life, they grew in that environment. But when the external pressures slackened, my horizon and all our horizons widened, and gradually, if only through chinks in the fence, we saw and got to know the "world outside". And we were startled to find that the "world outside" was quite different from what we had hoped: it lived by the "wrong" rules and values, it progressed in the "wrong" direction; it exclaimed "What an enchanting lawn!" at the sight of a boggy swamp, and "What an exquisite necklace!" on seeing the concrete stocks imprisoning people's necks; and while tears ran unchecked down the faces of some, others tripped along in time to a carefree hit-tune. How did this happen? What caused this yawning abyss? Were we the insensitive ones, or the world? Or was it all due to the difference in our respective languages? Why are people unable to understand every word distinctly spoken by others? Words die away and run off like water - tasteless, colourless, odourless, without trace. As I came to understand this over the years, the content, the sense and the tone of my potential speech - my speech of today changed. And now it scarcely resembles the one originally drafted during those freezing evenings in the camp. Man is built in such a way that (unless inspired by hypnosis) his experience of life, both as an individual and as a member of a group, determines his world outlook, his motivations and his scale of values, his actions and his intentions. As the Russian saying goes, "Trust not your brother: trust your own eye, even if it's crooked". This is the soundest basis for understanding one's environment an for determining one's behaviour within that environment. And for many a long century, so long as the limits of our world were not known or understood, until such time as it was permeated by unified lines of communication, until it was transformed into one single, convulsively beating lump: until then, people were guided unerringly by their experience of life within their restricted locality, within their community, within their society, and finally within their national territory. Then it became ossible for individual human eyes to see and to adopt some common scale of values to distinguish what is regarded as normal, what unbelievable, what is cruel, what criminal, what is honesty, what deceit. And although widely scattered peoples lived in very different ways, and although the scales of their social values could be strikingly different - just as their systems of measurement varied - only a few rare travellers were surprised by these differences, which were reported in periodicals as items of wonderment, but which brought no danger to a still disunited mankind. During the past decades, however, mankind has suddenly but imperceptibly become united reassuringly united and dangerously united, and as a result disturbances and inflammation in any one of its parts are almost instantly transmitted to the other parts, which may have no immunity. Mankind has become one, but without the stable unity which any community or even nation used to have. This unity has come about not through the gradual build-up of experience of life; not through the evidence of one's own eye, crooked though that may be; not even through one's own understandable mothertongue. This unity has come to us, over all barriers, through the medium of the international radio and press. We are overwhelmed by a torrent of events: in the space of one minute half the world learns of any event, but neither radio nor newspapers bring us any yardstick by which we can measure these events and judge them according to the laws which prevail in parts of the world that are unfamiliar to us. Neither radio nor newspapers can do it: these yardsticks have for too long and in too special a way been assimilated into the particular life of individual countries and societies; they cannot be conveyed in a trice. In different places, people apply to events their own tested scale of values: without making concessions, self-confidently, they judge only according to their own scale and not by any alien one. There are several such different scales of values in the world, if not many: there is a scale for events near at hand and a scale for events at a distance; there is a scale for old societies and a scale for young ones; a scale for happy events, a scale for unfortunate ones. Glaringly, the divisions f the scales fail to coincide: they dazzle and hurt our eyes, and so that we do not feel the pain we wave aside all alien scales, judging them to be folly and delusion, and confidently judge the whole world according to our own domestic scale. Because of this, what seems to us to be most momentous, ainful and insufferable is not really most momentous, painful and insufferable but simply that which is nearer to us. Everything which is further afield, which does not directly threaten to roll up to the threshold of the door of our own home today, will be recognised by us as being, in general, quite bearable and of tolerable dimensions - despite the groans, the stifled screams and lost lives, even though there be millions of victims. In one part of the world, not so long ago, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave their lives for their faith in God under persecution no less severe than that of Ancient Rome. But in another hemisphere a madman (and no doubt he is not the only one) rushes across the ocean to aim a dagger-blow at the Pontiff and thus to free us from religion! He was using his scale to decide things in the name of all of us. What, according to one scale, appears from afar as enviable flourishing freedom, according to another scale, near at hand, is perceived as vexatious constraint calling for the overturning of buses. What, in one area, could only be dreamed of as unattainable prosperity, in another area gives rise to ndignation and is considered vicious exploitation demanding an immediate strike. There are different scales for natural disasters: a flood with 200,000 victims seems of less significance than an accident in our own town. There are different scales for giving an insult: in some places even a sarcastic smile or a dismissive gesture is regarded as humiliating; in others even a cruel beating-up is pardonable and regarded as an unsuccessful joke. There are different scales for punishment and for crime. According to one scale, a month's imprisonment, or banishment to the country, or to a so-called "punishment cell" where they feed you with white bread rolls and milk, shocks the imagination and fills the columns of the newspapers with anger. According to another scale, people accept as reasonable prison terms of twenty-five years, dungeons where there is ice on the wall but where they strip you to your underwear, lunatic asylums for the sane, and the shooting on the frontier of countless people who won't see reason and who keep running away, one doesn't know where or why. And what worries us least of all are events in those exotic places about which absolutely nothing is known, from which we get no news, but only the flat and belated conjectures of a handful of correspondents. For these double standards, for this paralysis and lack of understanding of a stranger's distant grief, one cannot reproach man's vision: man is built that way. But for mankind as a whole, squeezed into a single lump, such a lack of mutual understanding threatens to bring a rapid and stormy end. When there are six, four or even two scales of values, there cannot be a single world, a single mankind: we shall be torn apart by this difference in rhythm, this difference in scale. Just as a man with two hearts is not long for this world, so we are unlikely to survive together on this planet. But who will reconcile these scales of values and how? Who will create for mankind a single system of evaluation - for evil deeds and good deeds, for what is intolerable and what is tolerable, for how the line is to be drawn between them today? Who will explain to mankind what is really terrible and unbearable, and what only irritates our skin because it is near? Who will direct our anger against that which is truly terri ble, and not that which is merely near? Who could carry the understanding of this through the barrier of his own human experience? Who would be able to bring home to a bigoted and obstinate human being the distant grief and joy of other people, the understanding of relationships and misconceptions that he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, compulsion and scientific proof are all powerless here. But fortunately the means to convey all this to us does exist in the world. It is Art. It is literature. Art and literature can perform the miracle of overcoming man's characteristic weakness of earning only by his own experience, so that the experience of others passes him by. Art extends each man's short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men's life-long experience, with all its burdens, colours and flavour. Art re-creates in the flesh all experience lived by other men, so that each man can make this his own. Even more, much more than this: countries, whole continents, repeat each other's mistakes at a later date, sometimes centuries later, when one would have thought everything was so painfully obvious. But no! What some peoples have already experienced, thought out and rejected is suddenly discovered by others as the very last word. Here again, the only thing that can take the place of experience that we have not lived is Art, literature. They provide a miraculous facility: that of overcoming differences of language, custom and social ystem, and conveying life experience from one whole nation to another. And this national experience, painfully built up over many decades by one nation, when conveyed to a second nation which has never had it, can perhaps save it from taking an unnecessary, mistaken or even ruinous path. Thus Art can somewhat straighten the twisted paths of man's history. Today, from the Nobel platform, I would insistently remind you of this great and blessed property of Art. There is another immensely valuable channel along which literature conveys human experience, in condensed and authoritative form: from one generation to another. Thus literature becomes the living memory of a nation. Thus it nurses and preserves the nation's lost history, in a form which is not suscptible to distortion and slander. And this is how literature keeps and preserves both the national language and the national soul. (Recently it has become fashionable to speak of the levelling of nations and of the disappearance of peoples in the melting-pot of modern civillisation. I do not agree with this idea, but discussion of it is a separate issue. Here it is appropriate to say just this: the disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalised personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colours, and embodies a particular facet of God's design). But woe betide that nation whose literature is interrupted by the interference of force. This is not simply a violation of the "freedom of the press": it is the locking-up of the national heart, the carving-up of the national memory. Such a nation does not remember itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and although its population supposedly have a common language, fellow-countrymen suddenly stop understanding each other. Mute generations live out their lives and die without telling their story either to their own or a future generation. If such geniuses as Akhmatova or Zamyatin are walled up alive for the duration of their lives, if they are condemned to create in silence until the grave, without hearing any response to what they have written, then this is not just their own personal misfortune but the deep tragedy of the whole nation - and, too, a threat to the whole nation. And in certain cases it is a danger for the whole of mankind, too, when the whole of history ceases to be understood because of that silence. Should Art and the artist go their own way, or should they constantly bear in mind their duty to society and make themselves useful to it, albeit without prejudice? This question has, at different times and in different countries, evoked heated, acrimonious and sophisticated debate. To my mind, the nswer is quite clear, though I shall not set about repeating the lines of the argument. One of the most brilliant discussions of this topic came in another Nobel Prizewinner's lecture, that of Albert Camus - to whose conclusions I am happy to subscribe. In any case, Russian literature has tended away from self-admiration and frivolity for decades now. Nor am I ashamed to continue in this tradition to the best of my ability. We Russian writers have long had an innate belief that a writer is capable of achieving much among his people - and that it is his duty to do so. Let us not deny the artist's right to express nothing but his personal experience and his introspective reflections, to ignore everything which happens in the rest of the world. Let us not make _demands_ on the artist: to reproach and request him, to coax and entice him to one's side - this surely is permissible. After all, the development of his gift is only partially his work: his gift is to a major extent something inborn, and together with it he receives a responsibility to check his own free will. Let us concede that the artist owes nothing to anyone: still, it hurts to find him capable of a retreat into worlds of his own creation or the wastes of subjective caprice, whereby he leaves the world of reality to hirelings, or nonentities, or lunatics. This twentieth century of ours has proved crueller than the preceding ones, nor did all its terrors end with its first fifty years. The same old primitive urges rend and sunder our world greed, envy, licence, mutual malevolence-though now they adopt euphemistic pseudonyms as they go, such as "class truggle", "racial struggle", "the struggle of the masses", "the struggle of organised labour". The primitive refusal to compromise has been elevated to the status of a theoretical principle: it is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. This refusal to compromise claims millions of victims in eternal internecine wars, tediously hammering home its message that there is no stable, universal human conception of goodness and justice, that all such conceptions are fluid and changeable, so that you should always act to the advantage of your own party. Whenever any group of workers sees a chance to seize n extra slice - never mind if they don't deserve it, never mind if it's more than they need - they up and grab it, and ruin take society. The extent of the violent swings to and fro within Western society - or so it seems to an onlooker from without - is so great that the stage must shortly be reached when the system will become unstable and must collapse. Violence, less and less restrained by the legal system built up over the centuries, strides bold and victorious through the world, caring not a jot that its sterility has been amply demonstrated and proven throughout history. It is not only mere brute force that is triumphant, but its strident justification also. The world is flooded with the brazen assurance that might is omnipotent while right is powerless. Dostoevsky's "Possessed" - figures in a gruesome nineteenth-century provincial fantasy, one would have thought - are spreading through the world, reaching countries where hitherto people could not conceive of such creatures. See how in recent years they have hijacked aircraft and seized hostages, caused explosions and started fires, signalling thereby their resolve to shake and destroy civilisation 1 And they may very well succeed in their aim. Young people, at an age when the only experience they have is sexual, at an age when they have no years of personal suffering and self-awareness to draw on, are enthusiastically repeating the discredited platitudes of our Russian nineteenth century in the fond belief that they've come up with something novel. The inhuman degradation of human beings practised by the Chinese Red Guards not long ago has been accepted by the young as a splendid example to be followed. The superficiality, the failure to understand the timeless essence of human nature! The naive confidence of these young people who don't know life! " We'll chuck out this crop of cruel, venal, oppressive rulers, and we, their successors, will be just and understanding, once we've laid aside our bombs and guns." But of course they won't. As for the people who've lived a bit and who know a thing or two, who could argue with these youngsters, many of them dare not argue: they try to ingratiate themselves with the young - anything so as not to look "conservative". This is yet another Russian phenomenon of nineteenth century origin: Dostoevsky called it "being in bondage to advanced notions". The spirit of Munich is in no sense a thing of the past, for that was no flash in the pan. I would go so far as to say that the spirit of Munich is the dominant one in the twentieth century. The civilised world quailed at the onslaught of snarling barbarism, suddenly revitalised; the civilised world found nothing with which to oppose it, save concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is an illness of the will-power of the well-to-do, it is the usual state of those who have surrendered to the lust for comfort at any price, have surrendered to materialism as the main aim of our life on earth. uch people and how many there are in the world today choose passivity and retreat just so that normality can last a bit longer and the onset of brutishness be put off for another day; as for tomorrow, you never know, it may turn out all right. (But it won't! The price of cowardice will be all the higher. Courage and victory come to us only when we are prepared to make sacrifices). Another thing that threatens us with destruction is the fact that our physically compressed, constrained world is not allowed to unite in spirit, that the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not permitted to dart from one half of the world into the other. This is for us a dire peril, this stopping the flow of information between different parts of the planet. Modern science knows that stopping the flow of information leads to entropy, universal destruction. Stopping the flow of information makes international treaties and agreements illusory: within the jammed zone it is no trouble at all to reinterpret any agreement, and even simpler to forget it as if it had never been (as Orwell understood very well). Those who live within the jammed zone are not so much Earth-dwellers as an expeditionary force from Mars who, knowing nothing whatever about the rest of the World, are ready to go and rample it down in the sublime confidence that they are "liberating" it. A quarter of a century ago, amidst the great hopes of all mankind, the United Nations Organisation was born. Alas, in an immoral world it too grew up immoral. It is not a United Nations Organisation, but a United Governments Organisation, which equates those governments which were freely elected, those which wire imposed by force, and those which seized power by force of arms. Thanks to the venal prejudice of the majority of its members, the UN jealously guards the liberty of certain nations and neglects the liberty of others. It obsequiously voted against investigating private grievances - the groans, cries and entreaties of simple, humble individuals, insects too tiny for such a large organisation to concern itself with. The best document it put out in all its twenty-five years was the Declaration of Human Rights, yet the UN did not endeavour to make endorsement of it an obligatory condition of membership, and thus it left ordinary people at the mercy of governments not of their choosing. It would appear that the shape of the modern world is entirely in the hands of the scientists, for all mankind's technological steps are determined by them. It would appear that the direction the world should take ought to depend, not on the politicians, but on the cooperation of scientists the worl over, particularly since the example of individuals shows how much they could all achieve by joining forces. But no, the scientists have made no positive attempt to become an important, independently motivated force among mankind. They shy away in whole congress-loads from the sufferings of others: it is more comfortable to remain within the frontiers of science. The same Munich spirit has spread its enervating wings over them. In this cruel, dynamic, explosive world, on the brink of a dozen destructions, what is the place and role of the writer? We writers have no rockets to blast off, we do not even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle, we are indeed altogether despised by those who respect only material power. Would it not be natural for us too to retreat, to lose our faith in the invincibility of goodness and the indivisibility of truth, and content ourselves with giving the world our bitter observations from the sidelines: how mankind is hopelessly corrupted, how people have become superficial and how hard life is among such people for lonely, sensitive, beautiful souls? But we do not have even this escape. Once we have taken up the Word, there is no evading it afterwards: the writer is not an outside judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, but an accomplice in all the evil perpetrated in his country or by his people. If the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the asphalt of another country's capital, those brown stains spatter the writer's face for ever. If some fateful night a trusting friend has been strangled in his sleep, the writer's hands bear the bruises from the rope. And if his young compatriots blithely proclaim depravity's superiority to honest toil, if they succumb to drugs or seize hostages, then the stench of their speech mingles with the writer's breath. Can we have the effrontery to say that we writers bear no responsibility for the plagues of the modern world? However, I am encouraged by my living awareness of universal literature as a single great heart, beating in response to the cares and sorrows of our world, although these are presented and viewed differently in its every corner. Over and above the purely national literatures, there did exist even in former ages the concept of world literature as a reality binding together all national literatures at their highest level, and as the sum of all literary influences mutually shared. But there was usually a time-lag: readers and writers became acquainted with authors in other languages after a gap that sometimes lasted for centuries, so that reciprocal influences were delayed and the reality within which national literatures at their highest level were bound together took shape before the eyes, not of contemporaries, but of later generations. But nowadays there exists between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another an interaction which, if not immediate, is very close to immediate - as I have experienced in my own case. My books - unpublished, alas, in my own country-rapidly acquired a responsive world readership in spite of hasty and often defective translations. Outstanding Western writers such as Heinrich Boll took it on themselves to produce detailed critical studies of my works. During all these recent years, when my work and freedom did not come to ruin, when they were being upheld against all the law of gravity, as if in mid-air, as if resting on nothing, upheld by the unseen, unheard thread of popular sympathy - all this time I could feel with the warmest gratitude, beyond all expectation, the support of the world brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astounded to receive the congratulations of famous European writers. It came about that no sort of pressure on me passed unnoticed. In the weeks, dangerous for me, that saw my expulsion from the Writers' Union, a wall of defence, raised about me by famous writers of the world, protected me from worse forms of persecution, while the hospitality of Norwegian authors an artists made ready a roof to shelter me if I should be, as then seemed likely, exiled from my homeland. Finally, my very nomination for the Nobel Prize originated not in the country where I live and work, but with Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still I received expressions of support from entire national bodies of writers. I have therefore understood and experienced this truth in my own life: that world literature as a unifying force is no longer an abstract sum of influences or a generalisation constructed by literary experts, but a common body and common soul, a living unity of heart in which the growing spiritual unity of mankind finds a reflection. State frontiers still stand out in crimson, are still inflamed by electrified wire and bursts of machine-gun fire, and some ministries of internal affairs still suppose that literature, too, is an "internal affair" under their jurisdiction. One is still presented with newspaper headlines "None of their business, interfering in our internal affairs!" - while in fact there no longer are any internal affairs in our cramped little world. Mankind can only be saved if all men are concerned about everything: if all the people of the East are not indifferent to what people are thinking in the West; if all the people of the West are not indifferent to what is happening in the East. True literature - which is one of the most delicate, most sensitive instruments at man's disposal - as already been one of the first to detect, assimilate and promote this feeling of the growing unity of all mankind. And so I confidently address myself to the world of literature of today - to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in person and perhaps shall never meet. Friends, let us try and help, if we are worth anything at all. In our own countries, which are torn by conflicts of opinion among parties, movements, castes and groups, who was there from the very beginning who was not a divisive force but a unifying one? That is the quintessence of the writer's position: he is there to give expression to the national language, which is the main clamp that binds a nation; to give expression to the very land occupied by his people; and if he is lucky, to give expression to the national soul. In my opinion it is within the powers of world literature in these troubled times to help humanity to comprehend its own nature in spite of what is being instilled into people's minds by biased persons and parties. World literature can transmit the concentrated experience of one land to another in sch a way that we stop seeing double and being dazzled, the different scales of values coincide, and each nation can learn the true history of other nations in an accurate, condensed form, grasping it fully with that sensation of pain that comes from living an experience oneself, and as a result of that knowledge be protected from eventual error. And we writers in so doing may perhaps develop our own world vision: we shall use the centre of our eye, like everybody else, to see what is near, and use the corners of our eye to begin absorbing what is happening in the rest of the world. And then we can compare and relate things on a world-wide scale. And who, if not writers, can censure not only their own inadequate leaders (in some states this is the easiest bread of all to earn; anyone who is not too lazy is busy doing it), but also their own society, whether for its cowardly selfhumiliation or for its smug weakness? Who but writers can reprove the thoughtless excesses of youth, and those young pirates with their threatening knives? We shall be asked, "What can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence?" But let us not forget that violence does not exist alone and cannot survive in isolation: it is inevitably bound up with the lie. Between them there is the most intimate, most natural, fundamental link: violence can only be concealed by the lie, and the lie can be maintained only by violence. Anyone who has once proclaimed that violence is his method is inevitably forced to choose the lie as his guiding principle. At its birth, violence acts openly, is even proud of itself. But it has scarcely established itself when it feels the air around it becoming more rarefied, and it cannot continue to exist without masking itself with the lie and wrapping itself up in its honeyed rhetoric. Violence does not always necessarily take you physically by the throat and strangle you: more often it merely demands of its subjects that they declare allegiance to the lie, become accomplices in the lie. And the simple step of a simple, courageous man is not to take part in the lie, not to support deceit. Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me. Moreover, writers and artists can do something more: they can vanquish the lie. Wherever else it fails, Art always has on its fight against lies, and it will always win. Its victory will be obvious, irrevocably obvious to all men. The lie can withstand a great deal in this world but it cannot withstand Art. Once the lie has been dispersed, the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its repulsiveness, and then violence, become decrepit, will come crashing down. This is why I think, my friends, that we are capable of helping the world in its agonised testing hour. We must not seek excuses on the grounds that we lack weapons, we must not give ourselves over to a carefree life, we must go out into battle. 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. Alexander Solzhenitsyn ====================== .