"The writer is no sideline judge"

Chapter 6 of The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney

6.

At various times and in various countries there have been heated, angry, and sophisticated arguments as to whether art and the artist may exist for their own sakes or whether they are required always to keep in mind their debt to society and to serv it, even though in an unbiased way. My own view on this is clear enough, but I am not here going to go into the lines of this argument again. One of the most brilliant statements on this theme was the Nobel Lecture of Albert Camus, and I can happily support its reasoning. Yes, and Russian literature has followed this direction for whole decades: not to let itself get lost in self-admiration, not to flit about too carelessly. I am not ashamed of this tradition and shall continue it myself as best I can. The concept has long been deeply rooted in Russian literature that a writer can do much for his people -- and must.

We are not going to flout the right of the artist to express exclusively his own personal experiences and observations while at the same time paying little heed to everything going on in the rest of the world. We are not going to make a demand on the artis in this respect; instead, we will reproach him, ask him, appeal to him, and coax him, for this is allowed us. Usually, after all, he develops his talent on his own only in part; he is endowed with most of it, ready-made, at birth, and along with his talent goes the responsibility for his free will. Let us grant that the artist owes nobody anything; it is still painful to see how he can by retreating into a world of his own creation or into the open spaces of subjective caprice, leave the real world in the hands of mercenary people who are often totally insignificant as well, and sometimes even out of their minds.

Our twentieth century has turned out to be crueler than those that went before it, nor did everything horrible in it end with its first half. Those same caveman emotions -- greed, envy, unrestraint, mutual hatred -- which as they moved assumed such high-sounding pseudonyms as class, race, mass, or trade-union struggle, are tearing our world apart and reducing it to chaos. Caveman unwillingness to accept compromises has been elevated into a theoretical principle and is considered to be a virtue of orthodoxy. It requires millions of victims in endless civil wars. It keeps drumming into our hearts that there are no stable and universal concepts of justice and good, that all values are fluid, that they change, and that this means one must always act as suits one's party. Any professional group, as soon as it finds a convenient moment to grab something off, even if it has not been earned, even if it is unneeded, will right away grab it off, and society can go fall apart. The upward and downward oscillations of Western society, as seen from outside, are approaching at both extremes that point where the entire system will be unable to return to a state of stability and must fall into ruin. Violence, continually less restrained by the confines of a legality established over the course of many generations, strides brazenly and victoriously through the whole world, unconcerned with the facet that its sterility has already been manifested and proven many times in history.

Nor is it merely brute force that triumphs but its trumpeted justification also: the whole world is being flooded with the crude conviction that force can do everything and righteousness and innocence nothing. Dostoyevsky's devils, seem a provincial, nightmarish fantasy of the last century, are crawling under our very eyes through the whole world, even in countries where they could not have been imagined. By hijackings of airplanes, the seizure of hostages, and the explosions and conflagrations of recent years they are signaling their intention of shaking and annihilating civilization! And it is quite possible that they may succeed. Youth -- at an age when it has had no experience other than sexual, when it does not have behind it years of its own suffering and its own understanding -- rapturously repeats our discredited Russian bywords of the nineteenth century while imagining it has discovered something quite new. The newfound degradation of the Chinese Red Guard movement is accepted by the young in every petty detail as a joyous example. Superficial is their lack of understanding of the age-old essence of humanity, naive is the faith of their inexperienced hearts: "Now we will overthrow these greedy and savage oppressors and rulers, and then we who take over from them, having put aside or grenades and submachine guns, will be just and sensitive." Don't you believe it! And those who have lived their lives and who understand -- many of them at any rate -- those who are able, if they wish, to refute the young do not dare to refute them, but even flatter them and fawn upon them, will do anything so as not to seem to be "conservatives" -- and this again is a phenomenon of the Russian nineteenth century. Dostoyevsky called it "Enslavement to progressive fads."

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past. It was not a brief episode. I would even be so bold as to say that the spirit of Munich dominates the twentieth century. The frightened civilized world found nothing better than concessions and smiles to counterpose to the sudden renewed assault of bare-fanged barbarism. The spirit of Munich is an illness of the will of prosperous people. It is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to their thirst for well-being at no matter what cost, to material prosperity as the principal goal of life on earth. Such people -- and there are a multitude of them in the world of today -- chose passivity and retreat, anything so that their accustomed life should continue undisturbed, anything so as not to have to cross over into hardship today, while tomorrow, they hope, will take care of itself. (But tomorrow never will take care of itself! The retribution for cowardice will merely be all the more cruel. Courage and overcoming are given us only when we are willing to accept sacrifices.)

And we are also threatened by destruction because the physically compressed and crowded world is not being permitted to fuse spiritually, because the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to leap freely from one half into the other. This is the ferocious danger of the blockage of information flow between areas of the planet. Contemporary science knows that blockage of information flow leads to entropy, disintegration, and universal destruction. Blockage of information flow renders illusory those signatures on international agreements and treaties: within a soundproofed and silenced zone any treaty whatsoever can be reinterpreted at will -- or, better still, just forgotten. It is as if it had never existed. (This is something Orwell understood very well.) Within the soundproofed zone the inhabitants are not so much people of the Earth as they are like a Martian expeditionary force. They know nothing important about the rest of the Earth, and they are quite ready to march out and trample it in the sacred conviction that they are "liberating" it.

A quarter-century ago the United Nations Organization was born amid the high hopes of humanity. But, alas, in a world without morality it, too, was born without morality. It is not a United Nations Organization but a United Governments Organization, in which governments freely elected are equated with those which have imposed themselves by force, which seized power by force of arms. With self-seeking partiality, the majority in the UN concerns itself jealously with the freedom of certain peoples and carelessly neglects the freedom of others. By an obsequious vote it has rejected consideration of private complaints --the groans, the cries, and the prayers of isolated little people who are merely people. For they are insects only, too small for such a great organization. The UN has never tried to make obligatory for governments as a condition of their membership the best document of its twenty-five years -- the Declaration of Human Rights -- and thus it has consigned the little people to the will of governments the did not elect.

It might seem as if the whole face of the contemporary world is determined by scientists. All the technical steps of society are decided by them. It might seem as if the direction the world will take must depend, in fact, on the world-wide collaboration of scientists, not politicians -- particularly when the example of a few individuals shows how much all of them could achieve together. But no, scientists have never made a clear attempt to become an important independent motive-force for humanity. Whole congresses back away form the sufferings of others: it is much cozier to stay within the bounds of science itself. That very same spirit of Munich has unfolded its enfeebling wings over them, too.

What, then, in this cruel, dynamic, explosive world, which stands at the very edge of its ten dooms, are the place and the role of the writer? We writers do not shoot off any rockets. We do not even push along the lowliest of hand carts. We are held in contempt by those who respect only material might. Is it not natural for us also to retreat, to lose our faith in the inviolability of good, in the indivisibility of truth, and merely impart to the world from the sidelines our bitter observations on how hopelessly humanity is corrupted, how degenerate people have become, and how hard it is for delicate and beautiful souls to live among them?

But even this escape does not exist for us. Once having taken up the word, it is never again possible to turn away. The writer is no sideline judge of his compatriots and contemporaries. He is guilty along with them of all the evil committed in his native land or by his people. And if the tanks of his father land have shed blood on the asphalt of a foreign capital, the brown stains have for all eternity spattered the writer's face. And if on a fateful night a sleeping, trusting friend has been choked to death, there are black and blue marks from the rope on the writer's palms. And if the young fellow citizens of his country impudently proclaim the superiority of debauchery to modest labor, or go in for narcotics, or seize hostages -- then all of this evil stink mingles in the breath of the writer.

Shall we find within us the insolence to declare that we are not responsible for the ulcers of today's world?