ABSTRACT
Afourth element in Solzhenitsyn’s “cascade of blows” to be aimed at the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1972 was his Nobel lecture. Although the outward form of the lecture was a meditation on art and the role of the artist, Solzhenitsyn had managed to include in it as comprehensive a denunciation of Soviet society as he had yet written anywhere. Solzhenitsyn explained it by the existence in the world of different scales of values, and by the different perceptions we bring to events according to their distance from us. Solzhenitsyn’s vision of art and literature was thus strictly utilitarian, and he made this clear in a long digression on the horrors of the twentieth century and the spectacle, as he saw it, of a world collapsing in anarchy. Solzhenitsyn responded with his usual tactic of writing an angry letter to Gierow and releasing it to the press.
