Nobel Prize Speech

Abstract

In October 1970 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This award was not welcomed by the Soviet government, however, and Solzhenitsyn declined to attend the prize-giving ceremony in December 1970 for fear of not being allowed to return to the Soviet Union.Subsequently, Solzhenitsyn tried to arrange for a private ceremony in Moscow where the prize could be handed over to him, but this in turn was prevented when the Soviet authorities refused to issue the Secretary of the Nobel Foundation, Dr Karl Ragnar Gierow, with a visa to travel to Moscow.Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn had composed his Nobel Prize address, which was a condition of receiving the prize, and would in normal circumstances have delivered it personally in Stockholm or at the private ceremony in Moscow. When neither of these courses of action proved possible, the text was sent to Stockholm and was published there in September in Swedish, French and Russian in the Nobel Yearbook.This new translation from the original Russian is exclusive to INDEX and represents the first magazine publication of the full text in English.