Seer and Sage: The Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech stunned the West, and his broader writings reveal a deeper critique of freedom and cultural decline still relevant today.

Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn waves as he gets on a train on June 1, 1994 in Vladivostok bound for Khabarovsk. Michael Estafiev/Getty Images

On June 8, 1978, exiled writer and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a commencement speech at Harvard University. His remarks provoked a blast of criticism then and would likely elicit the same response today.

The speech, later titled “A World Split Apart,” took approximately an hour to deliver, much longer than the ordinary commencement day address, both because of its length and because Solzhenitsyn spoke in Russian, with an interpreter, Irina Ilovaiskaya-Alberti, translating as he proceeded.