A Novel choice

The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once said that a close study of history reveals two contradictory trends. There are eras when people will put up with the most cruel and inhumane living conditions imaginable. Even worse, they will compound their plight by thinking up the most clever and ingenious ways of justifying the miserable systems under which they live. But that is only one-half of the human cycle. There are other epochs when people will undergo the most brutal and violent persecution in order to change their systems. Almost nothing, even death, will deter them from attempting to fulfill their appointed work. Solzhenitsyn thought that historical periods alternated between these two poles of moral contraction and expansion, social stagnation and reform. He believed there was no reliable way of predicting when the wheel would turn, prompting darkness to give way to light, or vice versa.

Texts include ‘A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’,
‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and ‘1914’ which was the most famous.