The second version of the classic formulation from the exiled, Nobel Prize-winning Russian’s seven part imprisonment account, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56. The first, from Part I, was quoted in Zach’s amazing post a few months ago, “Drunk Driving, Scapegoats and Gulag Wisdom”. Solzhenitsyn then restated it with a bit more umph in the first chapter of Part IV, ht PNW:
Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so long beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back on to the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted to travel. It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.
In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there rotting on prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuHJgCos7A&w=600]
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3 responses to “The Line Running Through Every Human Heart (According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)”
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You know this is sooo making it into Part 6. 🙂
Good Lord this is powerful. It has been 20 years since I read those books. Thanks for posting this!