 and particularly on his fictional works rather than his publicistic works. And to talk a little bit about some of those fictional works for which he won the Nobel Prize. And then I'll close by opening this up to any questions or any discussion that you all might want to address. So just very briefly, I'll try to make this short not to overwhelm you with facts. Solzhenitsyn is born basically 101 years ago, December 11th of 1918 in the Russian town of Kislovutsk, which is located in the southern part of Russia. He was the son of a Russian soldier who was fighting at the time in World War I. And while his father, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, survived World War I with metals and wounds and returned home, he died shortly before Solzhenitsyn, his son, was born in a hunting accident. And so Solzhenitsyn never got to meet his father. In order to find work, Solzhenitsyn's mother, had to move to a larger town, really a city, called Rastov, and because she had to essentially have child care, she left her son, Alexander Sochrel, Solzhenitsyn in the care of his Solzhenitsyn's aunt, her sister, and in effect Solzhenitsyn in his early boyhood, childhood days, is raised by his aunt Maria and his grandmother. In effect, he's separated from his mother for nearly three years, 1921 to 1924. Solzhenitsyn attends high school in Rastov, where his mother is working. He attends this middle high school, the years 1930 to 1937, where he meets a young girl by the name of Natalia Rzecitoskaya, whom he's eventually going to marry in 1940. In 1941, Sanya, as Solzhenitsyn was called, as in effect an adolescent, graduates from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rastov University. And then, of course, on June 22nd, basically three or four weeks after he graduated, Germany invades the Soviet Union. And after having served very briefly, as a matter of less than a month, as a village school teacher, Solzhenitsyn enlists as a private in the Red Army. This information becomes rather important as we go on into his biography. In 1942, Solzhenitsyn attends the third Leningrad Artillery School at Pastramat, which is basically about 180 miles northeast of Moscow, where he is promoted to the rank of lieutenant. On August 5th of 1943, Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Order of the Patriotic War after entering Arryol following a Red Army attack. Shortly thereafter, he is promoted to the rank of captain. In February of 1945, unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn is arrested. And this arrest leads really not only to the next 10 years, close to 10 years of his life, but it also produces, in effect, so much of his fiction and, indeed, a number of his non-fictional works. Can you hear me okay? Okay. He's arrested for expressing, at least the charges were, for expressing anti-Stalinist views, and he's removed from his battery command and transferred to the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow where he is interrogated for months and sentenced to eight years of prison. In effect, the reason underlying the charges for which Solzhenitsyn was arrested, he had been carrying on some correspondence with a kind of a childhood friend who had also gone into the war. And basically, the two of them, not in any dastardly kinds of ways, are basically complaining to one another about the Soviet Union's lack of preparedness, most specifically Stalin's lack of preparedness in terms of the Nazi invasion into Ukraine and then into Russia, that is, into the Soviet Union and the lack of preparedness in terms of the Soviet army being adequately clothed to fight a war through the winters and to have the proper kinds of munitions. In 1946, Solzhenitsyn is transferred to the Butyrkiy Prison in Moscow and then on to a prison scientific research institute which in Russia is called a Sharashka in the town of Hribinsk on the Upper Volga River and soon back to Zagorsk outside of Moscow. In 1950, Solzhenitsyn is sent to the Ekibastuys labor camp in Kazakhstan, one of the then republics of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union consisting of 15 republics, Kazakhstan, being one of the five central Asian republics. He works as a bricklayer there and he convinces his wife, Natasha, to whom he has been married since 1940, to divorce him while she is living in the city of Kriyazan. He does so as did hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who were being exiled into the system of Gulag, what we would probably call them concentration camps. And the reason that he, Solzhenitsyn requested that she divorce him had to do with the fact that the wives, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of those Soviet citizens who had been sent to the Gulag camps, any relative, any close immediate relative of a member of the Gulag, those relatives would be kicked out of their homes where they lived, they would be fired from their jobs, they would not be permitted to go on to graduate school and his wife was indeed applying to go to graduate school in Moscow at any rate the lives of relatives of Gulag prisoners was miserable and Solzhenitsyn and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of other Gulag prisoners did indeed convince their wives, brothers, sisters and so on to go ahead and cut those ties. Three years later Solzhenitsyn is released and exiled to Kokterec in southern Kazakhstan where he begins teaching at the Berlin High School. The reason he and once again hundreds and hundreds of thousands if not small number of millions of Soviet Gulag inhabitants are being released has to do with the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin. It's going to take a little over two years for this to be carried out and this is why Solzhenitsyn is released in about 1953. One year later, 1954, he is hospitalized in Tashkent which was then the capital of another of the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan. He is hospitalized for cancer radiation treatment. He is initially diagnosed as having something like six months to live but owing to the radiation treatment he survives and Solzhenitsyn is not going to die until 2008. So the initial prognosis did not turn out to be quite as dire as indicated. In April of 1956, Solzhenitsyn's sentence, as was the case for many, many of the Gulag prisoners, his sentence is annulled and Solzhenitsyn returns from exile to Moscow where he takes a teaching position at a small town called Durfapradukt, roughly 130 miles east of Moscow. In February of 1957, Natasha and Solzhenitsyn, Natasha being Solzhenitsyn's first wife, becomes his second wife, they remarried. Two years after that, he composes a novella which initially was titled Shchyev, Vasymsotpitsyat Shikiri. Shchyev being one of the final letters of the Russian alphabet, 854, which was his Solzhenitsyn's Gulag camp number that he had to war. That novel, and I'm gonna talk just a little bit about that novel, novella, really, is going to be renamed and the title that it takes is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This is the title, of course, that we know, but initially it was called Something Else. In 1961, the editor of Russia's largest and most popular and actually best literary journals, a journal called Novy Mir, or New World, the editor of that journal, Alexander Tvardovsky of poet, reads Solzhenitsyn's short story, Ivan Denisovich, which is authored by a pseudonym of Solzhenitsyn's, which was Alexander Rezansky, aka, of course, our own Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and recognizing the brilliance of Solzhenitsyn's novella, Tvardovsky determines that he's going to champion this. Now I don't want to go too far, too much into the weeds, but from roughly 1933 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, in order to publish a poem, a play, a short story, a novel, indeed, if you were a painter or a musician or a composer, et cetera, et cetera, one couldn't merely submit his or her artistic work for publication. One had to belong, in the case of writers, to the USSR Writers Union, Sayuz Pisatini. And unlike what we are used to, let's say in the West, certainly the United States, essentially if one wants to publish his or her literary work, you could even go down to Kinkals, you can just write it off, not in the Soviet Union at all, and to give you a sense, and please note the irony here. Imagine if my friend right up here, sitting in the front row, if he or to his right, if she wanted to have her short story or her novel or novella or whatever published, they would have to, of course, belong to the USSR Writers Union. The editor of this literary journal, Novi Mir, recognizes that's not going to happen. That's just not going to happen. So Toshenitsyn has not become part of the Writers Union. He cannot be what? He's not part of the Writers Union. Oh, no, no, no, he would never allow to be, be allowed, that is, to be part of the Writers Union, and perhaps even more importantly, he would never even request to be. Unlike in, I'm going to tell you that, unlike in the West, in fact, let me ask you, so that not only I am doing the talking. Let's say that my friend back here who's following the sleep as I talk, let's say that he wants to publish his novel. What do we consider in the West? What does one need to have at his or her disposal in terms of writing a novel, writing a play, creating a ballet, et cetera, et cetera? What do we consider to be the tools of art? What do we in the West? And the reason I'm saying the West is that we're going to, I'm going to, juxtapose what we know, I'll help you out to a certain degree, one thing would be talent. Well, yeah. What else? Agents. A publisher? Access to others. Agent, publisher, more important than these, however, inspiration, talent. We like, we like the West to feel or to think that we have something to contribute, et cetera, et cetera. In the Soviet Union for, oh boy, about 60 years, those three large criteria had nothing to do, talent, inspiration, our notion of truth, I would say, and authors or playwrights or musicians' notion of truth. In the Soviet Union, which operated under a very different kind of literary or artistic creed, one had to essentially ascribe to three criteria. One of those would be, whoops, I'm just stuck in one, it's not accurate, one would be something called partinist, and as you can hear from that first syllable, partinist means that in order to submit, let's say, your architectural plan, your music plan, your poem, your play, your novel, et cetera, et cetera, your artistic work, whatever that's going to be, I just realized, am I walking around? Is that gonna be a problem for you? Ah, I won't walk around, I apologize. It does touch a second on Vujnikov and Pasternak. Or what, let me finish this. Yeah. He had to subscribe to an artistic creed that held out essentially party values. Partinist means partiness. This is one of the three criteria. Didn't have to be talented, didn't have to be inspirational, but it had to ascribe to the values of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The second criterion in the Soviet artistic world had to relate to narodnest. Narodnest would translate into English roughly as art which is designed for the people, expressing the values of the people, the interests of the people, the narodnest. And lastly, partinist, narodnest, and oops, partinist, narodnest, e, oh, forgive me. No, criticize English. No, it'll come to me in a second. My point is, and I will remember this third criterion which is very important, note the absence of talent, inspiration, truth, et cetera, et cetera. All three of these criteria had to deal with the values of the people as prescribed of course by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Certainly the values of the party focusing on the people. Anything that dealt with individual myths, that was not permitted. So at any rate, the editor of Louis Muir, this periodical, literary periodical, imagine if, let's say, Lesley wants to publish her play. What do you think the chances are that she's going to be best advised to take it to Donald Trump, sling to none? In the Soviet Union, the editor of this literary periodical knows that the only way that Sozhenitsyn's novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has any chance of hell of being published is if Khrushchev, who at that time was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, if Khrushchev were to essentially provide his imprimatur, and that's exactly what happens. This is now roughly seven or eight years following the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party where Khrushchev in 1955 had issued his destalinization period. And he, Khrushchev, sees in Sozhenitsyn's novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a wonderful opportunity tool to essentially lend credence to Khrushchev's destalinization period and program. Now to continue, in October of 1962, Khrushchev indeed approves publication of Sozhenitsyn's novella, which is published on November 17th of 1962. By Tvardovsky's literary journal, Novenir. Now, a few words about the literary, climate, socialist realism I've just talked about. And so I'm gonna pause there to take us from essentially 1962 to roughly the end of Sozhenitsyn's life. The genius, the master, the artistic brilliance of Sozhenitsyn's novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, catapults him from a recent prisoner in a gulag camp system to briefly a couple of years of being a mathematics teacher at a high school in a very out of the way place, let's say something like the Northeast Kingdom in here in Vermont. Catapults him from essentially being an unentity to being recognized as the greatest living writer of the Soviet Union. And indeed, as he continues gradually to write and publish, although not publish within the Soviet Union, novels like Cancer Ward and In the First Circle and a lot of other short stories, et cetera, et cetera, he is recognized as perhaps one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in the Soviet Union. His works are rightly or wrongly, I think largely correctly in a number of ways, seem to continue in the vein of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I personally would probably say more so Tolstoy. Now, by early 1970s, having become essentially the lightning rod for everything anti-Soviet, anti-communist owing to the nature of his life, as well as the subject matter of his fictional works, Solzhenitsyn's, these works are never, excuse me, are not permitted to be published while he's living there in the 60s and 70s. And Solzhenitsyn becomes, in effect, such a dangerous, dangerous writer that he essentially is kicked out of the Soviet Union. He is put on the plane and taken initially to Switzerland where he spends close to a year or so. He finds that there are too many paparazzi and too many other problems that he encounters in Western Europe. And he looks to find a new place to live. Initially, he investigates Canada, but ultimately he ends up here in Vermont, as I think most of us already know. In those years, from what would this be? Roughly 1974 to 1993, Solzhenitsyn is living with his, now his second slash third wife in Cavendish with their children. And he becomes quite a name or builds quite a name for himself in the Solzhenitsyn family here in Vermont. Solzhenitsyn had announced quite publicly that he would never permit himself and his family to move back to the Soviet Union unless and or until the Soviet Union would publish all of his works, which by this point are quite large in number, in his original Russian, in his country. As we, some of us may or may not remember Garabachev, Garabachev was open in a number of ways to something that the Russians call glassnest. We in the translation refer to as openness. And in the mid to late 80s, here in the West, definitely and also to a certain degree in the Soviet Union, there was great hope that Solzhenitsyn and his family would be permitted to move back to the Soviet Union. And it's not until essentially the very end of the 80s that the Soviet Union permits all of his works to be published in Russian in his own country. And indeed, if I don't have my years wrong, I want to say in 1993, I think the summer of 1993, he leads Vermont, leads the United States. And quite tellingly, he returns to Russia at this point no longer the Soviet Union through Siberia. He gets, he boards a train in Siberia, travels across the entire country back to Moscow, giving speeches, talks, lectures all the way back. And oddly enough, just to end this part of my presentation, while Solzhenitsyn, I'm trying to think if we have ever in the United States had a figure, much less a literary figure, who commanded the respect, the awe, the admiration of the Russian people in the 60s and 70s and part of the 1980s as did Solzhenitsyn. Unfortunately, as the 1980s becomes, let's say, the mid-1990s and late-1990s, and certainly today, with the exception of Putin and kind of that layer of establishment, Solzhenitsyn, and the exception, I would say, of the people in their 70s and 80s, not too many people live on into their 20s, not too many people live on into their 90s in Russia anymore. Solzhenitsyn is largely forgotten. And the irony here, I was living and working in the Soviet Union in the late 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, Solzhenitsyn was so revered, and yet by the mid-1990s, he's all but forgotten. Putin, oddly enough, resurrects Solzhenitsyn. A question should come up or will come up eventually, why? Essentially, many of the Russian values, the Russian Orthodox Church values of Solzhenitsyn, played into, either played into or indeed Putin does believe in Russian, I would say Russian Orthodox Church value is not in terms of religion, but in terms of Russian nationalism. And Solzhenitsyn definitely was a Russian nationalist. At any rate, the reason I'm bringing Putin up is that in roughly 2000s, and I want to say nine, Putin does something very interesting. In the 60s and 70s and 80s and early, early 1990s, whenever I would go into the Soviet Union in various capacities, jobs, I would always be searched, body searched. And in those years, this is no longer the case, in those years I was being searched either for Western pornography, a Catholic or Christian Bible, or the literary works of Solzhenitsyn, or a person by the name of Bulgakov, his novel, The Master and Margaret Raven. And the irony is that now by 2009, Putin proclaims that all Russian high school students in order to graduate from high school have to read certain of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to show just how things change over time. Solzhenitsyn dies, I want to say, August 4th or 8th of 1902, 2008 I still haven't graduated from that. And his wife, Natalia, has continued essentially his fame and fortune in producing and publishing his literary works, looking over his literary empire, and she's done nothing but tremendous and fabulous things for carrying on the name of her husband. Now, by way of introducing essentially my main topic this evening, I'd like to draw upon a question that I'm frequently asked, or not by my students, and others as to why it was that I first became so drawn to a study of the Russian language, its literature and culture and history. As I respond to this question oddly enough, I have to say that it all began with my initial reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, newly published English language translation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I first read in the eighth grade at St. Patrick's Grade School in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in the early 1960s. As some of you may remember, back in those days, some of you may not, but as some of you know, back in those days, students often were broken down into color groups, that is, if you were a particular good reader, you would be in the gold group and the silver group and then green and et cetera, et cetera, relating to, of course, the level of a student's reading ability. Well, fortunately, I had been placed in the gold group which was permitted to read this hot off the press translation of Solzhenitsyn's novella. Not by any stretch of the imagination, a literary scholar at the time. I have to admit that what so attracted me to this novella had absolutely nothing to do with its characters or with its plot. What most excited me about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was all of the four-letter words that appeared on one breathlessly turned page after another. This, for me at the time, was the peak, the height, the epitome of great literature. I had just recently graduated, what was that? Gradua, what did we, not John Steinbeck. What's that other version of the novella that we read in high school? All of you did it, I know. Went to Salinger? Salinger, not Pierre Salinger, he was Kennedy's. J.D. Salinger, so in any case. I didn't get to that until I was in my 40s. Okay, well, I didn't know how to read such things. I went from J.D. Salinger to Solzhenitsyn quite, quite rapturously. Little did I know at age 13 that I soon would be drawn to a study of the Russian language and literature, or that one day I would be conducting research on the book that I'm currently writing about Solzhenitsyn's fiction. Solzhenitsyn, over the decades now of course, has been acclaimed by many to be the greatest fictional writer of the 20th century. Now obviously this is not biblical truth, these are the opinions of an awfully large number of people. Time Magazine, for example, named Solzhenitsyn to this lofty title in 2006 when it cited his Gulag Archipelago as the most important work of historic writing in the 20th century. In Russia today, Solzhenitsyn is regarded by most people as being the single most important contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union, or in primarily to his fictional works as well as to his fearless opposition to the Soviet state. Whether this is factual in the case or not, no one will deny Solzhenitsyn his place of honor among the pantheon of great Russian writers like Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Kurgenyev, or Boris Pasternak. Now in my lecture this evening, I want to shed some light to contextualize just how and why it is that Solzhenitsyn occupies such a vaunted position as a fictional writer and publicist. In my discussion I'm going to be making frequent reference and comparison to Leo Tolstoy since this is the one Russian writer to whom Solzhenitsyn is most often compared. By way of introduction to Solzhenitsyn's fiction and publicistic writing, however, I think it helpful to provide a bit of background to the distinctive and unusually important role of the writer in the history of Russian fiction. What I'm going to be going into right now is what makes it pretty much impossible to compare Solzhenitsyn to American writers or to a large degree to, let's say, West European writers. After all, every country has its important writers, of course, but precious few countries can boast of the honor that Russian literature is accorded as being one of the four greatest periods of world literature. The Greek enrollment in classics, Renaissance works, of course, the Age of Solzhenitsyn of Shakespeare, and the fourth being 19th and 20th century Russian literature. The first distinction that I would make is to observe that unlike most national literatures in the Western literary canon, the writer in Russia, at least since the 19th century and extending through the 20th century has traditionally been seen as a moral authority and a political truth teller. Whether we're talking about Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgin, Anon, Anon, Anon, Leo Tolstoy, for example, was received as both a prophet and a teacher, as well as being a holy fool. Now, holy fool in Russia is a very different thing than what we would think a fool is. Pilgrims would travel across Russia to Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Palyana. If they were fortunate enough to be grounded in an audience, they would ask questions as if of a saint. What is the nature of evil? For example, they would ask Tolstoy. What is the meaning of life? What questions? How can we best understand Russia's destiny? Are we Russians a part of Europe or of Asia? And lastly, who are we Russians? To a very large degree, all of Russian literature, whether it's Pushkin or Pustov-Nok or so-and-so, can be reduced to these kinds of questions. Now, these are pretty heavy questions for an ordinary reader of fiction to ask of a writer. Something must be going on here beyond the reading experience of, let's say, the ordinary reader of American fiction. For the answer to this question, I think that we need to consider the nature of how it is that Russian culture and civilization differs from that of our own Western culture and civilization experience, particularly as it applies to literature and to fiction. That the history of Russian culture and civilization did not develop along the same lines as Western European culture is readily acknowledged. Western civilization, for example, is the recipient essentially of the culture of Rome, Italy. Russia, too, takes its origins from Rome, but not the Western Rome of Italy, but the Eastern Rome of Byzantium, Eastern Rome of Byzantium, from whom it received not only its Christian number, but also many of its cultural, political, and intellectual foundations. Consequently, Russia would never sit at the banquet tables of scholasticism, humanism, or of the Renaissance and the Reformation, or the age of the scientific discoveries in the late 16th and 17th centuries, or of the 18th century Enlightenment, or the 19th century experience of American democracy. Russia never sat at any of those banquet tables. No, Russia would develop among very different lines of culture and civilization experience. To win, let me pose a question to our audience. If it were possible to reduce the history of Western civilization to just one term, to just one concept, what, in your opinion, might it be 2,000 years of Western culture and civilization? We're gonna try to reduce to one concept. Now, the reason I'm going into this, try not to walk out of the arms of the camera, is that I want to contrast it to the Russian civilization experience. And the reason we're looking at the Russian civilization experience is because we're talking about essentially 1,000 years, well not quite 1,000 years, of Russian writers, but particularly Alexander the Sargellese. What, in your opinion, might that one concept be? I'll get you started to a certain degree. In the West? In the West, someone might say, for example, freedom. Others might say democracy. Others might say capitalism. Others might say, well, leave it at that. Those three, four or five concepts that I've just noted all are subsumed under the one term that I'm challenging you to recognize. So, let's begin with anything, yes? Elections. Elections? Elections, let's... Well, it's... No, I don't... Freedom, elections. Well, the barrage is the king of France, believe it or not, was an elected position. I'll help you out. The notion of elections and of freedom are subsumed under this one term, yes? Individuality. Individuality. Individuality, and we certainly in the West over... Not over 2,000 years, what I would say, probably growing from about the 16th century we're moving in a direction more and more of individuality, but this too is subsumed under the term that I'm looking for. So, brutally, I'm going to say you. Progress, oh, that's very good actually. Progress, whether we're talking about the scientific discoveries, whether we're talking about the Greeks and the Romans. There, the notion of progress is subsumed under this one term, my friend over here, in a stunning red sweater. How do you know it's not the right answer to present one? Osvaldo. Leslie? My students love it when I call them, yeah. I was on board with the individuals. Individuality, all of these terms that you have suggested fall under the concept of what is called, in English and Greek, logos. What does logos mean? Law, logic. Whether it's the Greeks and the Romans, the democracies of the 19th century, the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th century, Renaissance Reformation, essentially, I can't say this anymore, but man that is human beings looked to a combination of law, eventually law, but more importantly, logic. When we, whether we are going to produce capitalism or democracy or progress or freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we, over those, over the centuries, not all the way back to 2000 years, over the centuries, we have employed essentially logic as how to improve essentially our lives, our well-being, whether we apply the logic to the scientific revolution and when we hit the 18th century, when we say, well, if we employ logic to human societies, the same way that we have applied logic and science to understanding the physical universe, we can apply the same tools essentially to how it is that towns can grow to become cities, how cities can produce commerce, how commerce can produce essentially a new kind of citizen going all the way back to Roman citizens, et cetera, et cetera, but it has always, or we looked of course to computers, that's the last time I was kind of up on things current in the world today. What did I just see a couple of nights ago? You're gonna know better than I for sure. All of these new ideas, these new technological, scientific tools, concepts that we are applying today, we of course are using or employing a spirit of laws. Now the reason I go into this is to contrast Russia and people, trust me, great chess players, sharp, brilliant minds. They do not issue from a spirit of laws. And this now I'll go ahead and you don't have to accept this. In fact, my students often think that I'm smoking something funny. If we look at a thousand years of Russian culture, civilization, and history, it's not logos that explains essentially the destiny of Russia. It's the concept of beauty. Let me explain what I mean by that. Or not just pretty girls. Not just pretty girls, nor pretty boys. The beauty of let's say in the 10th and the 11th and the early 12th centuries, the beauty of the Russian churches that would call out in the countryside would call the people to assembly. In the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, the beauty of the Russian icon. Do we all know what an icon is? How does, who have I left off here? Ah, our person who brings us here together this evening. How does an icon differ from, let's say the Catholic or the Western Christian holy cards, statues, and so on? What is the difference between a holy card, a religious statue, and an icon? He's invested with a spiritual meaning like Andrei Rubioff, right? True, he's the person. Not only he, but he's the main one, sure. In Western Christianity, going back to my days in St. Patrick's Grayskow, read the holy cards, holy pictures, statues, crucifixes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Essentially, we're symbols of truth. At least, we're held to be symbols of truth. The Russian icon has nothing to do with symbolism. In the Russian religious spiritual experience, the icon is not a symbol, but instead is a direct, immediate communication of truth through beauty. The same way that the church, the Russian churches in the fields were in the 10th century, the same way that the bells, the Russian bells in the 11th and 12th centuries, the icons now in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, when we come then to the 19th and 20th centuries, the next experience in beauty, in Russia, that communicates truth to Russian people through beauty, is the Russian written word. The literary creations of the Pushkins, the Pasternak's, the Ahmatovas, the Bilwies, the Dostoevsky's, the Tolstoy's, et cetera, et cetera. The writers who communicated truth through the beauty of the written word, all the way, I would say, probably to about approaching the end of the 20th century. This is Russia's claim to understanding the universe, the meaning of life, who and what Russia is, et cetera. Those same questions that we in the West asked ourselves, if we go back to Escalus and the Greeks and the Romans, et cetera, et cetera, they were trying to figure out essentially the relationship of humans to the gods. And we move on from there over the millennia to a point where today we're looking for truth in terms of science. What is it, how is it that technology and science can bring to us human beings? Well, my point is, is that Russia, Russian people, Russian culture and civilization sit in a very different civilizational experience than do we in the West. Had some of you been to Russia, traveled to Russia? I don't know your own individual experiences, but for at least 50 years, the most common thing that I hear from American tourists who go to Russia or even for my students who go to study Russian in the Soviet Union or in Russia today is how it is that Russians are different from us Americans. Well, yeah. And, well, it is, but they're different in very, I would say, unique ways. And I would posit, and I would never ask anyone to accept what I have to say as truth, but I would posit that this can be understood, and this is not going to take us back to socialism, can be understood in terms of what makes Sozhanitsyn such a different writer. Confused that this is a discussion that you presented for logic and then the mysticism of the Russian. Spirituality, not mysticism. It goes back to the attitude and the... Goes back to... It goes back to the division between the Slavoj Fine and the Russian. Some Russians, some Russians in the 19th century were referring to the French rationality and the logic because they said, you know, we have to organize logic and other people in the Middle East there are more on the mystical side and they believe in God and so forth. You are absolutely right, but does the Ypsky answers your question? Yeah. Have you read from the punishment? Yes. Okay. Have both of us, I would imagine. What does this the Ypsky say about rationalism? By the way, what does Putin say about rationalism? Reason. Does the Ypsky... If we think of Raskolnikov, the young... What is he? Probably about 22, 23 years old. University student who has just been kicked out of the university because he doesn't have money to pay. And he develops a philosophical theory. And what is the theory he develops? Raskolnikov. Excuse me, Napoleon is about the other people. The law is not applied to him. That's right. He, Raskolnikov, indeed sees himself as a kind of Napoleon-like person. In the 19th century, Napoleon was probably the main inspiration to so much art and literature in the 19th century. But at any rate, does the Ypsky proves Raskolnikov wrong? Raskolnikov, I hope I'm not letting any, what do we do, let the beans out of the bag or the cat out of the bag, whatever it is. Spoiler. Spoiler. Spoiler. Have we all read or should I not say what he does? I said I've never read it, but if we... He has a theory which he puts to practice. He theorizes, Raskolnikov theorizes that this somewhat well-off old, what do we call it, usurer, money lender, money lender, a yoga controller, that the world of Russia, St. Petersburg, is going to be better off if we rid St. Petersburg of this old bag who's only interested in money. And he, Raskolnikov, rationalizes as had been coming out of Western Europe at least since the end of the 18th century and penetrates Russia, particularly Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1850s and the 1860s, and will do so easily to the end of the 19th century, Raskolnikov rationalizes that he is doing Russia, St. Petersburg, a service by murdering this old bag. Dostoevsky tells us, shows us, makes it very, very clear, if we, if one, employs reason to explain or to justify his or her or our existence, we will be led astray by the West. I don't know the degree to which you follow Puchin's speeches, proclamations and so on and so on, but at least since 2009, Puchin has been downplaying the West, the West, of course, being the home, the land of reason. And he, Puchin, who does understand Russia, whether we like him or not, he understands Russia, often well. Well, it's okay. Puchin says that, no, we Russians have the right approach to life. Spiritual values, not theories and rationalizations. Now, to continue, so I can finish this off and then we can go to questions. The phenomenon of the writer as a moral authority and a political truth teller, intensified in Russia with the advent of Bolshevism. How could it not? Part of the brutal messianism of the Soviet regime was to turn writers into what Stalin used to call engineers of human souls, end of quote. The poet, 20th century poet, Osik Mandelstam's summation of the Soviet leadership's obsession with literary authority would become the epitaph for a perverse culture. Mandelstam says poetry is respected only in this country, Russia. People are killed here for their poetry. He was Ivan. He makes a statement in the 1930s. He says, there is no country in which more people are killed for poetry. Today I suppose we would say perhaps journalism. Like hundreds, if not thousands of other writers in the Soviet Russia, Mandelstam, of course, died in a second prison term in the Gulag camps in the 1930s. As David Remnant, the editor of the New Yorker writes, the history of opposition in the Soviet Union was largely a matter of literature. I would not make that claim for today but I would through the end of the 20th century. A legacy that reached its climax with the barbed wire and the mass graves in Sozhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago. Real Russian literature in the Soviet Union, not the lying socialist realism of the Kremlin, was considered as holy. In an empire where honest clergy were killed or oppressed, where every church and synagogue was infiltrated by informers for the secret police, secular parishioners knelt before the poem, the short story, the novel, before illegal onion skin manuscripts known by the Russian term, some is not, were passed from hand to hand as sacred texts. I'm going to, since I've gone longer than I had anticipated, I'm going to summarize the end of my presentation. Essentially, in his works as different as they are and each and every one of his literary fictional works, deals essentially with Sozhenitsyn's own experience in the Gulag camps between 1946 and 1954. We have a slave-like camp one day in the life of Ivan Denisevich, which draws upon Sozhenitsyn's own experience in the early 1950 in the northern Gulag camp of Ekibastu, and where he develops a theme universal to concentration camp literature. In this novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich, Sozhenitsyn investigates the moral dilemma of collaboration with evil in the name of science. In his novel, Cancer Board, Sozhenitsyn investigates, essentially, the main thematic question of that novel, which is, at what right does the state or medicine, this is, after all, a cancer board, have the authority, the moral authority, to tell us prisoners who are dying of one form of cancer or another. This is all based on Sozhenitsyn's life experience. He's asking, who gives the state or medicine or doctors the authority to dictate our lives? It is a fascinating novel, about which I cannot say too much more without revealing too much information. In the brilliant short story, Matrilna's, hard to translate this into English, Matrilna's home or Matrilna's yard, we have a very simple, elderly peasant woman. She's in her mid-60s, whose simple, impoverished life provides a backdrop for the kind of selfless spiritual values, not religious values. I think we in the West sometimes confuse religion with spiritual values. In Russia, it's spiritual values which take precedence over religion. But in any way, that leads the narrator to conclude the story's closing sentence with a Russian proverb. Hence why I'm writing this particular book. Basically, a village cannot stand without a pravidnik. And that would translate into English without a just person. And in this short story, a fabulous short story, perhaps one of the most beautiful works written by Sojanitsyn, he demonstrates how it is that it's not laws or legality or proclamations or state legislatures or federal national congresses that lead us, that lead one, that lead a country, essentially to its destiny. It's the views, the life of essentially the righteous person, the pravidnik, or in her case, a woman, pravidniksa. In his novel, in the first sermon, certainly to my preference, probably Sojanitsyn's greatest work, the author investigates the moral dilemma of collaboration with evil. If we think about the collaboration of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Soviet state, if we think about one's own collaboration with evil. In the case of the protagonist of the novel in the first sermon, the hero, whose name is Gnieb Gniezhin, recognizes that collaboration, no matter how unfreely contracted, is never ethically neutral or correct. The protagonist Gnieb reflects essentially Sojanitsyn's own experience in 1949, 1950, in one of these, again, Gulag camps. But this one is in Moscow. And it's a camp for mathematicians, physicists, and people in the sciences. And this is based on fact, on history. The hero, Gnieb, is who's already been in the camps for five years, that is, the kind of camp that Ivan Denisa, which was in, kind of pits hell. But owing to his mathematical mind, he is brought to this special camp on the outskirts of Moscow, essentially to be involved in scientific research work ordered by Stalin himself, which is also factual, to develop a technology where earphones, microphones, can be lodged in any park or camp or home throughout the entire Soviet Union in order to arrest even more people. And the deal, so to speak, that Gnieb is presented, if he contributes to the creation of this scientific technology, he will be freed from the Gulag. He will be given, for your charge, a home in Moscow. He will be paid untold amounts of money. He will be allowed to be rejoined with his, he's going to be given back his life, his wife. He and a number of other characters in this novel opt, irrationally, not to accept freedom. They opt not to collaborate with evil in order to improve their life circumstances. So I'm going to close, essentially, with that observation. Solzhenitsyn's literary works, and I would probably suggest starting with Ivan Denisovich and then Matrona's house, and then going to Cancer Ward in the first circle, explain to us why it is that he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. They are brilliant works, not at all akin to any works that we in the West read, literary works that we in the West read. And with that, I'm going to conclude my presentation and turn this over to you all for any comments, questions, and so on. Thank you. Yes. I have a really small question, unfortunately, logically irrational. When you submitted his first work to that magazine, and then you said that even though he wasn't a member of the writers union, Khrushchev approved it. OK, that to me is a big leap. That's what? It's a big leap. So what happened there? Did the publisher read the time so well that he thought that I could get this published without getting my head cut off, and I could go directly to Khrushchev's office? Going directly, this makes no sense to a rational mind, of course. But in the Soviet Union, going directly to the head of the country, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev provided his information, and what he said, no, this novel must be published. So the publisher did that? The publisher took it to Khrushchev. And do you believe that Khrushchev personally read it? Yeah, for a variety of reasons. Khrushchev was from kind of a Ukrainian background. He's really a peasant. Right. And if you should go on to read this novella, One Day in the Life, almost everyone in these camps are peasants. And the values of this novel are Russian, or let's say, Slavic, Ukrainian, Russian, peasant values. Secondly, what commended to Khrushchev, this particular novella, is that in his mind, he's probably right, unleashing the free thinking, the thoughts, of a non-stalinist worldview would serve his Khrushchev's de-stalinization. Was the timing perfect? OK. Absolutely. Had this been ten years earlier? He was able to take the next step to de-stalinization, and here's a work that can become popular that people identify with, and say, yeah, he's right. Just a long period should be over. Had this been ten years earlier, Solzhenitsyn would have been sent back to the camps? Just for some reason. As with the publisher. That's right. As with the publisher. I would like to know the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and the other dissidents. I remember very well, in the 16th, Daniel and Sinyavsky, for example, were in a big trial about liberty, writing. The one dissident that Solzhenitsyn met with, communicated with most, was not Danielle and Sinyavsky, but Andrei Sakharov. 1954 winner of the Nobel Prize for physics. Physics, I think. He was the father of the hydrogen bomb in Russia. The two of them met. Oh, and there's also the pianist. Oh, gosh. Rastaprovich, do I have that? Those three were very close. Daniel and Sinyavsky, they would have been too bohemian for Solzhenitsyn. So no, they didn't. They were, I would say, broadly speaking, part of that dissident circle. Not that they met, but they held similar beliefs of freedom. Then another thing I would like to ask you is to come back to talk about the Dechengrist, which Decemberists? Yeah. Because these people that were sent to the Gula, they had a president, and the Decembris were sent to, and they created alternative schooling. And it was a very interesting thing. There is not much written or, at least I don't know much about that story. Too slow it would have been put in Decembris. The experience of the Decembris, and what, briefly speaking, on December 16, of 1825, a relatively small group of Russian noblemen and aristocrats who had returned about 10 years earlier from Western Europe fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. When they returned to Russia over the next 10 years, they meet surreptitiously. And what they are agitating for, but secretly, is basically a constitutional monarchy. And on, I think it's December 11, 1825, they stage a protest, if some of you have been to St. Petersburg, on the square, right in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral. And those Decembris, they're probably about 300 in number. I think 25 of them are sentenced to death. They're hanged. And the others who are not hanged are put on trains bound for Siberian, well, trains and wagons, bound for Siberia. And part of the irony is that, as we know, Dostoevsky himself, after the Seppes in 1849 and 1850, Dostoevsky is sent to Siberia to, let's say, the 19th century version of the Gulag on trains. And 100 years later, Sozhenitsyn takes the same trains, goes to the same camps as did Dostoevsky. While we in the West are not too familiar with the Decembris, even Russian high school students, and we all know the degree to which American high school students either are or are not familiar with our history, Russian high school students and everyone older than them, eat, live, and breathe the Decembris 1825 revolt. Maybe one last question, because I see some of you are needing to go. Can you tell us where he died? Sozhenitsyn. Yes. Outside of Moscow. Not back to Russia. Yes, he goes back in 1993. I know he never comes back to the United States. And frankly, I'm not aware that he ever leaves Russia after 1993. If he would have, I could see him going perhaps to Italy or Paris. I would have to look into it. But he never goes back here. And his son, his son the pianist? Yes, a concert pianist. And as I say, London and one of them is in New York. Well, thank you for your attention. I hope you go out and read any one of these works or more than one of these works. And should you want, I can bore you in all some of the ways. I'd love to talk about Sozhenitsyn's literary works. Thank you. In the West, the concept of asking the government to have any opinion in what you're writing is so foreign. It went, what, huh, what? And the government here, they wouldn't even have anything with it. If you recall when I talked about the role of the importance of the written word in Russia, the very first proclamation that the new Tsar, Nicholas I, makes after the December's rule, whereas his brother, what, short dies after, is he declares that he, the Tsar, again, think of Obama or Trump, et cetera, et cetera, proclaims that he, the Tsar of Russia, will be the translator, the censor for Pushkin. That's how important Pushkin's works were. Stalin, in the 1930s, proclaims essentially that the Soviet writer, and the term he applies, is an engineer of Soviet souls. The role of the writer, the role of the writer in the West, certainly in the United States, is absolutely negligible by way of comparison with the role of the writer. In fact, in his novel, In the First Circle, Sozhenitsyn has a chapter where he states that the most important political role in Russia in the 20th century is that of the writer. And he's right. Russians know he's right. I know he's right. More importantly, he knew he was right. So a little about Russians that avid readers still? Avid readers, yes, but not in the way that they were in the 20th century. The main reason being, in the 20th century, Russian citizens, Soviet citizens, had absolutely nothing to do. That's going to say so. My media superseded that, just like it was. Russian people can now make money. Money now means something. And so rather than reading the way they read in the 20th century, they're out there trying to make a buck. Did you write a book about the Russian Revolution? The library does close at 8 o'clock. Oh. I hope you're looking to hear from the station. Thank you.