An Exile in Time and Space

The addresses collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were written by a man on the run. The earliest is his Nobel Prize lecture, printed in 1972 after he sent it to Stockholm in place of a live appearance. Given the way his novels depicted Soviet Russia, he worried that if he traveled to Sweden in person, he might never be allowed back. He was probably right. The following Christmas, his monumental exposé of Stalin’s camps caused a sensation when it was published by a Paris press. Within months of The Gulag Archipelago’s appearance, in February of 1974, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov wrote to Party leader Leonid Brezhnev that something must be done about “the Solzhenitsyn problem.” What was done was to haul Solzhenitsyn onto a plane bound for Frankfurt.