THE SHADOW OF TRUTH
Ethical Concerns in the Writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Keywords:
Ethics, Politics, Totalitarianism, Solzhenitsyn, Sartre, Havel, Existentialism, Humanism, Lev Tolstoy, Human NatureAbstract
“One word of truth will outweigh the entire world.” These were the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn while accepting the Nobel Prize in 1974. The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history, thanks largely to two ideologies – Fascism and Marxism. While there have been numerous studies on Nazi Germany, there have been relatively few on what transpired in Soviet Russia. This paper examines the contributions of the Russian writer and philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the understanding of the workings of totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn wrote numerous works like The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipalego. This paper will be examining his major work called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The main intention is to probe the ethical concerns that the writer raises in this work, along with his deep understanding of human nature. This paper also seeks to compare Solzhenitsyn’s views with that of thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre and Vaclav Havel. The key query here will be the essence-existence debate that Sartre initiated in his seminal work ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ and an attempt will be made to show how Havel and Solzhenitsyn would differ from Sartre. Finally there will be an attempt to establish how Solzhenitsyn reaffirms Lev Tolstoy’s theory of history, according to which history is a process where ‘great individuals’ play a minimal role.
References
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