REAGAN QUOTED SOLZHENITSYN IN ADDRESS TO SOVIETS
Author:
Date: Sunday, January 3, 1988
Page: 22
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Among the stirring phrases that made up President Reagan's New Year's
message to the Soviet people was a quote from a writer whose works are banned
in the USSR: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
According to the text of Reagan's speech that was released by the White
House, the president said: "We will never forget that a wise man has said
that, 'Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone. It is
necessarily interwoven with falsehood.' "
The quote is taken from an address Solzhenitsyn planned to give had he been
permitted to travel to Stockholm when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1970. He never got to give that address, but the text was
smuggled out and published in the West.
Solzhenitsyn burst upon the world literary scene in 1962 with the
publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a fictional account
of a day in a Soviet penal camp. Solzhenitsyn had served eight years of a 10-
year sentence in various such camps.
Since that publication, Solzhenitsyn's works have appeared in his native
country only in secretly circulated scripts, so-called zamizdat publications.
In 1974 the Soviet government expelled Solzhenitsyn to West Germany. He now
lives in Cavendish, Vt.
The White House press office could not be reached yesterday for comment on
whether the president used the phrase knowing it was from Solzhenitsyn.
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