In October 1970, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, warned against the suppression of literature, which helps preserve national memory and truth, and appealed to artists and writers to stand against oppressive governments and violent acts and extravagant lies.

“The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing,” the man who had spent nearly a decade in the labor camps of the Gulag told a complacent world. “The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.”

Solzhenitsyn had served time in Russian prison and labor camps for having criticized Josef Stalin in correspondence with a school friend. He declined to attend the prize-giving ceremony himself, for fear of not being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. (His new wife was expecting their first child.) The text of the address, portions of which are below, was secretly sent to Stockholm and published in 1972.

Writers and artists, Solzhenitsyn said, would conquer falsehoods in the end. The “nakedness of violence” would be “revealed in all its ugliness.” And one word of truth would “outweigh the whole world.” His admonition and courage and confidence were needed then, including in Russia; they are needed now, even in America. The “fog of lies” can envelop even shining cities on hills.

—Peter Wehner

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up—a strange cast-up from the ocean?—something unearthed from the sands?—or an obscure object fallen down from the sky?—intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement—right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another— grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel—for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best—if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it.

One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today’s ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.

Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence—in destitution, in prison, in sickness—his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.

But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings—they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist’s vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.

Archaeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?

And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die— art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited—dimly, briefly—by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.

Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see —not yourself—but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan …

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes—but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition—and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force— they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today.

In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others— perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I—have perished. Of them, I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of GULAG, shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands; and beneath the millstone of shadowing and mistrust I did not talk to them all, of some I only heard, of others still I only guessed. Those who fell into that abyss already bearing a literary name are at least known, but how many were never recognized, never once mentioned in public? And virtually no one managed to return. A whole national literature remained there, cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe. Russian literature did not cease for a moment, but from the outside it appeared a wasteland! Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, two or three trees overlooked by chance.

And as I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, with bowed head allowing others who were worthy before to pass ahead of me to this place, as I stand here, how am I to divine and to express what THEY would have wished to say?

This obligation has long weighed upon us, and we have understood it. In the words of Vladimir Solov’ev:

Even in chains we ourselves must complete
That circle which the gods have mapped out for us.

Frequently, in painful camp seethings, in a column of prisoners, when chains of lanterns pierced the gloom of the evening frosts, there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear: what our successful ambassador would say, and how the world would immediately respond with its comment. Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence.

When at last the outer pressure grew a little weaker, my and our horizon broadened and gradually, albeit through a minute chink, we saw and knew “the whole world”. And to our amazement the whole world was not at all as we had expected, as we had hoped; that is to say a world living “not by that”, a world leading “not there”, a world which could exclaim at the sight of a muddy swamp, “what a delightful little puddle!”, at concrete neck stocks, “what an exquisite necklace!”; but instead a world where some weep inconsolate tears and others dance to a light-hearted musical.

How could this happen? Why the yawning gap? Were we insensitive? Was the world insensitive? Or is it due to language differences? Why is it that people are not able to hear each other’s every distinct utterance? Words cease to sound and run away like water—without taste, colour, smell. Without trace.

As I have come to understand this, so through the years has changed and changed again the structure, content and tone of my potential speech. The speech I give today.

And it has little in common with its original plan, conceived on frosty camp evenings.

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, “Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye.” And that is the most sound basis for an understanding of the world around us and of human conduct in it. And during the long epochs when our world lay spread out in mystery and wilderness, before it became encroached by common lines of communication, before it was transformed into a single, convulsively pulsating lump—men, relying on experience, ruled without mishap within their limited areas, within their communities, within their societies, and finally on their national territories. At that time it was possible for individual human beings to perceive and accept a general scale of values, to distinguish between what is considered normal, what incredible; what is cruel and what lies beyond the boundaries of wickedness; what is honesty, what deceit. And although the scattered peoples led extremely different lives and their social values were often strikingly at odds, just as their systems of weights and measures did not agree, still these discrepancies surprised only occasional travellers, were reported in journals under the name of wonders, and bore no danger to mankind which was not yet one.

But now during the past few decades, imperceptibly, suddenly, mankind has become one—hopefully one and dangerously one—so that the concussions and inflammations of one of its parts are almost instantaneously passed on to others, sometimes lacking in any kind of necessary immunity. Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us—in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world—this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.

And if there are not many such different scales of values in the world, there are at least several; one for evaluating events near at hand, another for events far away; aging societies possess one, young societies another; unsuccessful people one, successful people another. The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold—with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims—this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

In one part of the world, not so long ago, under persecutions not inferior to those of the ancient Romans’, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave up their lives for their belief in God. In the other hemisphere a certain madman, (and no doubt he is not alone), speeds across the ocean to DELIVER us from religion—with a thrust of steel into the high priest! He has calculated for each and every one of us according to his personal scale of values!

That which from a distance, according to one scale of values, appears as enviable and flourishing freedom, at close quarters, and according to other values, is felt to be infuriating constraint calling for buses to be overthrown. That which in one part of the world might represent a dream of incredible prosperity, in another has the exasperating effect of wild exploitation demanding immediate strike. There are different scales of values for natural catastrophes: a flood craving two hundred thousand lives seems less significant than our local accident. There are different scales of values for personal insults: sometimes even an ironic smile or a dismissive gesture is humiliating, while for others cruel beatings are forgiven as an unfortunate joke. There are different scales of values for punishment and wickedness: according to one, a month’s arrest, banishment to the country, or an isolation-cell where one is fed on white rolls and milk, shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, prison sentences of twenty-five years, isolation-cells where the walls are covered with ice and the prisoners stripped to their underclothes, lunatic asylums for the sane, and countless unreasonable people who for some reason will keep running away, shot on the frontiers—all this is common and accepted. While the mind is especially at peace concerning that exotic part of the world about which we know virtually nothing, from which we do not even receive news of events, but only the trivial, out-of-date guesses of a few correspondents.

Yet we cannot reproach human vision for this duality, for this dumbfounded incomprehension of another man’s distant grief, man is just made that way. But for the whole of mankind, compressed into a single lump, such mutual incomprehension presents the threat of imminent and violent destruction. One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: we shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

A man with two hearts is not for this world, neither shall we be able to live side by side on one Earth.

But who will co-ordinate these value scales, and how? Who will create for mankind one system of interpretation, valid for good and evil deeds, for the unbearable and the bearable, as they are differentiated today? Who will make clear to mankind what is really heavy and intolerable and what only grazes the skin locally? Who will direct the anger to that which is most terrible and not to that which is nearer? Who might succeed in transferring such an understanding beyond the limits of his own human experience? Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof—all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature.

They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man’s detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.

And even more, much more than that; both countries and whole continents repeat each other’s mistakes with time lapses which can amount to centuries. Then, one would think, it would all be so obvious! But no; that which some nations have already experienced, considered and rejected, is suddenly discovered by others to be the latest word. And here again, the only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another. To an inexperienced nation they can convey a harsh national trial lasting many decades, at best sparing an entire nation from a superfluous, or mistaken, or even disastrous course, thereby curtailing the meanderings of human history.

It is this great and noble property of art that I urgently recall to you today from the Nobel tribune.

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation.

(In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.)

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin—interred alive throughout their lives—are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

In some cases moreover—when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety—it is a danger to the whole of mankind.

At various times and in various countries there have arisen heated, angry and exquisite debates as to whether art and the artist should be free to live for themselves, or whether they should be for ever mindful of their duty towards society and serve it albeit in an unprejudiced way. For me there is no dilemma, but I shall refrain from raising once again the train of arguments. One of the most brilliant addresses on this subject was actually Albert Camus’ Nobel speech, and I would happily subscribe to his conclusions. Indeed, Russian literature has for several decades manifested an inclination not to become too lost in contemplation of itself, not to flutter about too frivolously. I am not ashamed to continue this tradition to the best of my ability. Russian literature has long been familiar with the notions that a writer can do much within his society, and that it is his duty to do so.

Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but—reproach, beg, urge and entice him—that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.

Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule—always do what’s most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down. As seen from the outside, the amplitude of the tossings of western society is approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall. Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. Dostoevsky’s DEVILS—apparently a provincial nightmare fantasy of the last century—are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of; and by means of the hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and fires of recent years they are announcing their determination to shake and destroy civilization! And they may well succeed. The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: let us drive away THOSE cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we!), having laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it! . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear “conservative”. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called SLAVERY TO PROGRESSIVE QUIRKS.

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the Twentieth Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

And on top of this we are threatened by destruction in the fact that the physically compressed, strained world is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other. This presents a rampant danger: THE SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction. Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, even simpler—to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but by an expeditionary corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as “liberators”.

A quarter of a century ago, in the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations Organization was born. Alas, in an immoral world, this too grew up to be immoral. It is not a United Nations Organization but a United Governments Organization where all governments stand equal; those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons. Relying on the mercenary partiality of the majority UNO jealously guards the freedom of some nations and neglects the freedom of others. As a result of an obedient vote it declined to undertake the investigation of private appeals—the groans, screams and beseechings of humble individual PLAIN PEOPLE—not large enough a catch for such a great organization. UNO made no effort to make the Declaration of Human Rights, its best document in twenty-five years, into an OBLIGATORY condition of membership confronting the governments. Thus it betrayed those humble people into the will of the governments which they had not chosen.

It would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them. It would seem that it is precisely on the international goodwill of scientists, and not of politicians, that the direction of the world should depend. All the more so since the example of the few shows how much could be achieved were they all to pull together. But no; scientists have not manifested any clear attempt to become an important, independently active force of mankind. They spend entire congresses in renouncing the sufferings of others; better to stay safely within the precincts of science. That same spirit of Munich has spread above them its enfeebling wings.

What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?

But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen. And if the tanks of his fatherland have flooded the asphalt of a foreign capital with blood, then the brown spots have slapped against the face of the writer forever. And if one fatal night they suffocated his sleeping, trusting Friend, then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his young fellow citizens breezily declare the superiority of depravity over honest work, if they give themselves over to drugs or seize hostages, then their stink mingles with the breath of the writer.

Shall we have the temerity to declare that we are not responsible for the sores of the present-day world?

However, I am cheered by a vital awareness of WORLD LITERATURE as of a single huge heart, beating out the cares and troubles of our world, albeit presented and perceived differently in each of its corners.

Apart from age-old national literatures there existed, even in past ages, the conception of world literature as an anthology skirting the heights of the national literatures, and as the sum total of mutual literary influences. But there occurred a lapse in time: readers and writers became acquainted with writers of other tongues only after a time lapse, sometimes lasting centuries, so that mutual influences were also delayed and the anthology of national literary heights was revealed only in the eyes of descendants, not of contemporaries.

But today, between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another, there is a reciprocity if not instantaneous then almost so. I experience this with myself. Those of my books which, alas, have not been printed in my own country have soon found a responsive, worldwide audience, despite hurried and often bad translations. Such distinguished western writers as Heinrich Böll have undertaken critical analysis of them. All these last years, when my work and freedom have not come crashing down, when contrary to the laws of gravity they have hung suspended as though on air, as though on NOTHING—on the invisible dumb tension of a sympathetic public membrane; then it was with grateful warmth, and quite unexpectedly for myself, that I learnt of the further support of the international brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astonished to receive congratulations from well-known western writers. No pressure on me came to pass by unnoticed. During my dangerous weeks of exclusion from the Writers’ Union the WALL OF DEFENCE advanced by the world’s prominent writers protected me from worse persecutions; and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared a roof for me, in the event of my threatened exile being put into effect. Finally even the advancement of my name for the Nobel Prize was raised not in the country where I live and write, but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still entire national writers’ unions have expressed their support for me.

Thus I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an “internal affair” falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: “No right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today—to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see.

Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language—the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.

And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement—not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one’s bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfied weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives?

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life—but by going to war!

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

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In his day, the 18th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was what we would call a “celebrity academic,” enjoying top university posts and a wide readership for his books. This might explain some of the hostility that Hegel faced from his contemporaries. Arthur Schopenhauer called his writing the work of a “clumsy charlatan,” which rendered readers “incapable of reflection, coarse and bewildered.” His compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche snorted that an education based on “Hegelian craniums” is “terrible and destructive.”

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were largely overlooked during their lifetimes, so professional jealousy no doubt accounted for some of this. But deep intellectual differences also underpinned their animus. Whereas Hegel’s critics largely promoted individualism, the famous author of The Phenomenology of the Spirit taught that fitting into society is generally the best path to a good life.

For an individualist like me—a bit Nietzschean in worldview—Hegel’s approach might appear unsympathetic. But I have been reconsidering Hegel, and now I think that understanding his arguments for a more communitarian attitude might offer us a nudge toward greater happiness—one we didn’t even know we needed.

[Bertrand Russell: Philosophy’s ulterior motives]

Hegel is probably best known today for his teleological belief that human history tends toward progress and is guided rationally by Geist, or “spirit,” a quasi-supernatural force for good. He taught that this progress is slowly achieved through the operation of the “dialectic.” According to this concept, a grand conversation occurs in three parts—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—in which one side presents an argument (thesis), another side gives an opposing viewpoint (antithesis), and all of this results in a resolution (synthesis) that involves more nuanced understanding of the issues. This rational reconciliation of differences thus leads to advances—in other words, progress.

For Hegel, the Geist just needs time to work out its logic. Whereas today’s political arguments in America might look chaotic and terrible, Hegel might say that we’re too close to them. Take the longer perspective and you will see that spirit is placing the hard-edged progressive activism of the past decade in dialogue with the new electoral turn toward Trumpism, and that the synthesis of that dissension will be a more balanced moderation in the years ahead.

Despite ups and downs, Hegelian progress generally grants people greater happiness over time. Yet Hegel also made a startling assertion about when that happiness would be most abundant. “Periods of happiness are empty pages in history,” he wrote in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, “for they are the periods of harmony, times when the antithesis is missing.” In other words, we remember when life is a boiling cauldron of emotions and experiences, but these are not the really happy moments. Happiness comes in the peaceful, unmemorable parts of life.

So how do we get more of this unremarkable bliss? For the answer, in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives a practical tutorial in dialectics—first offering two common but wrong answers, then the right one. One typical wrong way we search for happiness is what he calls Recht (literally, “right”), which involves maximizing individual satisfaction or, more colloquially, “If it feels good, do it.” Hegel argues that Recht leads us to chase one pleasure after another, “ad infinitum, never [enabling] it to get beyond its own finitude.” In other words, the goal of individual satisfaction is like filling a hole that can’t be filled.

The other wrong way that people pursue happiness is through Moralität (“morality”), by exercising their own personal sense of right and wrong. This approach is more in line with the individualism of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—to quote Polonius in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” Hegel never says that a person’s conscience is bad; he simply observes that relying solely on one’s own conscience can lead to problems such as loneliness and depression. (If you happen to be someone who insists on speaking up for what you believe is right and have suffered social rejection as a result, you might relate to this.)

For Hegel, the correct answer for peaceful happiness is Sittlichkeit, or “ethical order,” by which he means prosocial behavior grounded in tradition and custom learned from one’s community. As he explains in Philosophy of Right, this ethical order involves striving “to make oneself a member of … civil society by one’s own act, through one’s energy, industry, and skill,” thus “gaining recognition both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.” This is where true happiness occurs, Hegel believed, because we succeed in realizing ourselves both as individuals and as members of the community.

For Hegel, then, we will find happiness by participating in the ordinary ways of well-ordered civil society. That means not dashing from excitement to excitement, pursuing your own goals to the exclusion of others’ well-being, or expressing yourself in a way that offends people. It means fitting in, conducting yourself ethically, with your family, community, and country.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How my struggle with Wittgenstein can make you happier]

Modern social scientists have shown that this argument about Sittlichkeit is sound. The social capital one has as an active member of the community strongly predicts one’s happiness. Even so, to some people’s ear, Hegel’s conception of the good life may sound very conservative or reactionary. Just fit in! he seems to be saying.

As an Emersonian individualist myself, I recoil from such a command. How many times in history have people just gone along with what civil society deemed right and proper, not consulting their own consciences, in order to maintain a private happiness at the expense of what is just? The result can be dangerous, even barbaric, and sometimes, you have to sacrifice your personal happiness for what is right.

But I also see how this misses the way that Hegel’s philosophy can help a natural individualist like me. His injunction about synthesis and ethical orderliness can be a valuable corrective for a tendency to seek big experiences at the expense of the moments of peace, and an egotistical tendency to disregard the wisdom and desires of the community in favor of my own opinions. I like to use Hegel’s ideas in the form of a simple set of questions to help temper my nature. Perhaps this checklist can be useful to you as well.

1. Where can I find happiness in the ordinary, unremarkable points in my life? What gifts am I overlooking because they are not bright and shiny, although they are beautiful in their smallness? Perhaps this is a peaceful evening at home, a quiet walk before dawn, or a little contemplation over a delicious cup of coffee.

2. Am I looking for a lift in my mood today from my personal ambitions and primal drives? This is Mother Nature with her false promise that satisfying this or that urge will give me the satisfaction I seek. Instead, what individual desire can I shed today?

3. Am I asserting my views in a way that ignores others or is disrespectful to their dignity? Am I attached to my opinions as if they were precious jewels? How can I let go of my own rightness today and listen with love more to others?

4. How might I balance my own needs and desires with those of my family and community today? How can I be a better spouse, a better parent, a better colleague and friend, and a better citizen?

If you’re anything like me, there’s little danger that the fire of your individualistic nature will be extinguished by this interrogation. Instead, it should just sand down your edges a bit, make you more cognizant of your strong self-focus. With that awareness to keep you in check, you might just find yourself happier as a result.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson: American civilization]

The work of any philosopher is subject to many possible interpretations. This is especially true of Hegel, whose prose is famously dense and elliptical—just ask Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—and no doubt, my brief account of his thought will earn plenty of disagreement. After all, Hegel himself is said to have remarked: “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”

But even on this point—about his resistance to intelligibility—I discern a useful Hegelian lesson for a better life. The goal is not to be understood by the world but to understand the world as best we can and participate in our human community with a spirit of love.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on February 28, 2025

Field research in Antarctica is an extended exercise in endurance. Grant approval alone can take more than a year, long enough to grow a beard like one of Ernest Shackleton’s shipwreck survivors. The military cargo planes that carry researchers from New Zealand to McMurdo, America’s largest coastal base on the continent, regularly turn back halfway in bad weather. At McMurdo, scientists sometimes wait for weeks for a safe flight into the frozen interior. They land on sketchy, unimproved runways and make camp right on the ice sheet. Scientific instruments occasionally glitch and break down in the extreme cold, and so do human bodies. Just when everything finally starts working, a rogue storm may roll over the horizon. If things go sideways, a rescue flight might be a week away.

President Donald Trump has just made this work even more difficult. Last week, his administration initiated a round of coarse-grained layoffs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal agency that funds and supports all American field research in Antarctica. The team of program directors that shepherds this research to fruition was already shorthanded, and now it’s down to just one permanent full-time staffer. The approval of new research proposals will slow considerably, and in the coming years, the amount of research conducted each field season could be severely reduced. As far as anyone knows, these firings were not deliberately designed to derail American research in Antarctica. But they are nonetheless part of a larger dismantling of climate science across the federal government. Whether through sheer carelessness or in pursuit of his stated belief that climate change is a “hoax,” Trump is sabotaging this science when it is more crucial than ever to the human future.

The U.S. has long had the most extensive system of bases and aircraft in Antarctica. The NSF has an unmatched record of safely placing researchers in the continent’s most forbidding environments, and not just for intellectual pursuits. They are on urgent business, trying to find out just how quickly Antarctica’s ice sheets will crumble and melt into the ocean, raising sea levels high enough to drown coastal cities worldwide. These scientists drill deep holes through the mile-thick ice to see what’s happening at a glacier’s base. They send submersibles into the crucial zone underneath ice shelves, where warm water eats away at the frozen support structures that stop glaciers from sliding faster into the sea. They measure the annual ice loss on Antarctica, which directly correlates with sea-level rise worldwide. They put all these data in context by pulling up cores of ice that give us a million-year look back at the continent’s climate.

Despite the civilizational import of this work, in recent years, Antarctic research has struggled. At full strength, the NSF’s Antarctic Sciences Section is supposed to have approximately nine full-time program directors keeping the field research machine running. These directors evaluate research proposals. They assemble expert panels to review them. They go to Antarctica to support the fieldwork that they approve. Even before Trump took office, funding constraints and a long pandemic hangover had slowed polar research. Fieldwork was regularly being reduced in scope or postponed, sometimes for years. The fleet of C-130s that carry scientists to the poles had started to age badly. The agency demolished a dorm at McMurdo years ago, and still hasn’t rebuilt it. In December 2024, only four full-time permanent program directors, plus one part-timer, were in place for Antarctic science.

Of those four, three were in their probationary period, for one reason or another, making them vulnerable to the Trump administration’s order laying off probationary federal employees. These firings weren’t carried out with a great deal of grace. At 9:30 a.m. last Tuesday, David Porter, a program director, received an ominous email requesting his presence at a Zoom meeting. The meeting was a mess, Porter said. The agency’s staff had sent out a faulty Zoom link, and at one point, Porter was accidentally made a host. The director of the NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, was conspicuously absent. (The NSF did not respond to a request for comment on Panchanathan’s absence. In an emailed statement, an NSF spokesperson acknowledge that the organization had terminated 170 employees and said, “We thank these employees for their service to NSF and their contributions to advance the agency mission.”) Kelly Brunt, another program director, received word about the meeting while she was still on her way home from Antarctica after dropping off her big red NSF-issue parka in New Zealand. Her flight to the U.S. made an unplanned landing on the way, and she had to log on to the meeting from her hotel room before dawn, bleary-eyed and anxious. “Right away, we were told that we would be terminated by the end of the day,” she told me.

Now only one full-time permanent program director remains, along with a few part-timers and staff that rotate in from academia. There is no indication that the agency will be able to hire more. The remaining members of this patchwork crew will have to keep working through their own backlogs. They’ll attend to the laid-off directors’ proposals and half-finished projects if and when they can. Porter told me that in the final hours during which he could access his email, he contacted researchers whose projects he was supporting. “All I could tell them was, ‘Hey, you aren’t going to hear from me again, but good luck.’”

[Read: The erasing of American science]

The polar-research community is pessimistic about the odds of recovery. Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, fears that funding cuts will follow the loss of the program directors. “There are a few senators who are champions of this stuff, but in this budget-cutting environment, they are going to have lots of other priorities to protect,” he told me. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a glaciologist at Penn State, told me he worries that the global prestige of America’s polar-science programs will suffer. Work of this kind requires permanent infrastructure that only rich countries can build. The NSF has recently sought to make up for its various problems by leaning into international partnerships, but other countries may not be as interested in them going forward, Anandakrishnan said. “They may wonder if the NSF even has the bandwidth, or if it can still be trusted as a partner.”

Trump has always recoiled from the international character of climate science, and since his return to the White House, he has sought to hobble its global institutions. On his first day in office, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He later forbade American government scientists from working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the domestic front, Trump has frozen all NSF grants, including those that fund climate science. A court has since paused that order’s enforcement, but some money transfers are reportedly still being held up. A wait-and-see atmosphere has seized the whole field while Congress negotiates a new federal budget: Some graduate programs have paused admissions and universities have instituted hiring freezes. The Trump administration has reportedly proposed a 30 percent budget cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s most comprehensive sources of climate data. Mass layoffs at NOAA have reportedly already begun. The administration did many of these things during the planet’s hottest January on record.

Climate change is a global problem, and its effects are best studied closely wherever they occur, but especially in Antarctica. More than 80 percent of the planet’s ice sits atop its surface. Scientists have lately focused on West Antarctica’s ice sheet, because it has historically looked more unstable. If and when it slides into the ocean, sea levels could rise by up to 10 feet, erasing islands and inundating cities that sit near the world’s shorelines, where more than 40 percent of all people live. Anandakrishnan told me that he and his colleagues now suspect that East Antarctica’s ice sheets could be similarly unstable. It will take work to find out how shaky they are, and whether anything can be done to keep them in place.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: A wild plan to avert catastrophic sea-level rise]

Trump will almost certainly bequeath a warmer Earth to the next administration. The past five American presidents have each done the same. What makes Trump different is his insistence on disrupting the basic apparatus of climate science, the effort to understand how warm the planet will one day become, and how quickly its seas will rise. Heating up the world for future generations is a crime, but this is a cover-up.