La actualidad del mensaje de «Archipiélago Gulag» 50 años después

The 50th anniversary of the reception of The Gulag Archipelago and Live Not by Lies in the West invites us to rediscover the legacy of dissidence and, in particular, the contemporary relevance of Solzhenitsyn’s twofold message: the value he places on literature for its ability to communicate the universality of the experience of particular individuals and peoples and thus to show the critical extent of human experience, when considered in all its depth; and the mysterious and unexpected power of the concrete person, faithful to his or her conscience, against totalitarianism, against the abstraction and violence of the Soviet ideology and regime. The writer testifies in his narrative and literary work that, before the choice between surviving at all costs or resisting and being oneself, the hell of the camps witnessed the unusual occurrence of flashes of good, truth and beauty which he considers, in their exceptionality, more worthy of attention than evil.