Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is probably most famous for his 1976 trilogy The Gulag Archipelago (wherein he details his arrest and interrogation (for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters), and his 8 years of incarceration and resistance within Soviet labor camps), along with his 1962 novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes a typical day in the Soviet Gulag from the perspective of a prisoner.
And more recently (2012), his epic novel In The First Circle was finally published in a full, uncensored edition.
But many may not be aware that Solzhenitsyn was arrested on the day he released Live Not by Lies (February 12 1974), and the day before he was exiled to West Germany. In those last words before leaving the Soviet Union he urged Soviet citizens to refrain from cooperating with the government’s lies, for even the most timid can take this simple step of individual sovereignty. As he states in the essay:
“…violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence. And violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies—all loyalty lies in that. And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me…it is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies…because it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.”
You can download Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not By Lies from our Free Ebook Library.
