Modern

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1918–2008

Novelist of the Gulag

The line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart, and he wrote it after the camps, in The Gulag Archipelago. It is a refusal to put the whole evil outside oneself. He had earned the right to a simpler story and declined it.

In the canon

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.The Gulag Archipelago

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