This collection brings together ten of Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.
Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide-forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West-and searching for humanity's possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and-perhaps most centrally-the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.
These annotated speeches, including his timeless "Nobel Lecture" and "Harvard Address," have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn's sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn's life.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Nobel Prize laureate, Soviet political prisoner, Russian prophet and religious believer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's writing casts a large shadow over the short and terrible twentieth century. In this collection of his selected speeches, some of which are translated into English for the first time, Solzhenitsyn offers his reflections and insights about role and purpose of art, the human need for God, and the forces from both East and West that seek to destroy the human spirit. We Have Ceased to See a Purpose is essential reading for those who wish to learn from one of the giants of twentieth-century world literature and understand the line that 'separates good and evil' in 'every human heart.'" -Lee Trepanier, co-editor of Walk Away
"This new collection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speeches invite a new generation of students and other readers to hear his provocative and prophetic arguments on key cultural, political, literary, and moral questions." -Matthew Lee Miller, author of The American YMCA and Russian Culture
"This welcome selection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most penetrating speeches appeal to, and renew, the 'sparks of the spirit' that alone offer hope in this and other troubled times." -Daniel J. Mahoney, co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn belongs to the select category of writers who not only chronicled global events, but actually shaped them. Part of an ongoing endeavor by the University of Notre Dame Press to make the writer's legacy available to the English-speaking reader, this expertly curated collection brings together Solzhenitsyn's most important speeches. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years after they were given, they continue to have the capacity to dazzle, engage, and surprise." -Richard Tempest, author of Overwriting Chaos
"The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West's likely future. . . . He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient." -Commentary
"Solzhenitsyn's most significant orations . . . He spoke not only to condemn 'bestial Communism' but also to explain what he perceived as the weaknesses and flaws of the modern West. . . His diagnosis has lost none of its resonance today." -National Review
"In We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the estimable musician and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn collects and annotates the ten most stirring public addresses of his father, Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." -Claremont Review of Books
"We Have Ceased to See the Purpose serves both to present forceful ideas relevant to today's cultural catastrophe and help fill the remaining gaps in Solzhenitsyn's works to be translated into English." -The Book Beat
"Solzhenitsyn's diagnosis leaps from the page and reaches across the decades to our recent political and cultural miasmas." -Civitas Outlook
"We Have Ceased to See the Purpose . . . shows Solzhenitsyn steadily developing a grand theory of history amid the contemporary goings-on that occasioned his speeches." -Law & Liberty
"Beauty will save the world, Solzhenitsyn keeps repeating, after Dostoyevsky. One of the world's greatest artists and citizens, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did all he could to make this prophecy come true." -Wall Street Journal
"A lesser-known aspect of Solzhenitsyn's legacy is the speeches he gave during his 20 years of exile in the West. Many will recall his controversial 'Harvard Address' in 1978. . . . Yet he gave many other speeches equally prescient and prophetically perceptive." -Chronicles
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 222 mm
Breite: 145 mm
Dicke: 16 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-268-20858-5 (9780268208585)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and the Between Two Millstones memoirs.
Ignat Solzhenitsyn is a pianist and conductor based in New York City. The middle son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he is translator and editor of several of his father's works in English.
Translated From the Russian
Editor's Note
Acknowledgments
"Not Everything Can Be Named" by Ignat Solzhenitsyn
1. Nobel Lecture
2. An Orbital Journey
3. If One Doesn't Wish To Be Blind
4. The Shallowing Of Freedom
5. Harvard Address
6. Templeton Lecture
7. Playing Upon The Strings Of Emptiness
8. We Have Ceased To See The Purpose
9. A Reflection On The Vendee Uprising
10. The Depletion Of Culture
Brief Background
Solzhenitsyn Timeline
Notes
Index
