For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government; that is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones

Today is the birthday of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918- ), the Russian Writer who wrote

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

A couple of months ago, Le Monde's Florence Noiville reported that

The "rentrée littéraire" - the September start of the literary year - is as French as the baguette or French cheese. This year, it so happens, there are about as many new French novels as there are cheeses in France: 449, to be exact. The difference is that while the number of cheeses hardly changes from year to year, the total number of French novels published never stops rising. It has doubled in 10 years; everyone in France, it seems, has a novel lurking inside them.

Another difference - a consequence of the first, perhaps - is that a certain number of these new books are pretty odorless and flavorless. If they all come out at once, in September, that's so they can have a chance - at least in theory - of carrying off one of the fabled literary prizes that are awarded in autumn, like the Goncourt or the Renaudot.

The prizes, too, are peculiarly French; their juries, unchanged from year to year, battle with one another to see who will be the first to crown the book everyone is talking about. The result is that from the end of August to the end of October each year, publishers, literary critics and judges compete in an absurd marathon - with the authors themselves often left far behind. …