The weight of the word of truth: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970.
‘During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. … In 1961 … I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’
These brief words from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s short biography for his Nobel Prize lecture in 1970 touch upon the turning point in his life when he risked publication. He had already spent eight years of his life in prisons of the Gulag (acronym in Russian for ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps’) for a thinly disguised slur on Stalin in a letter to a friend. The cost of careful words in a beautifully written novella about prison life could easily be higher than a casual phrase. It turned out that this and later publications, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, helped in the downfall of the Soviet regime. Such was the power of great art, serving truth at any cost. The Times newspaper later reflected, ‘The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union from the appearance of Gulag’.