We Have Ceased to See the Purpose

"Nobel Prize laureate, Soviet political prisoner, Russian prophet and religious believer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writing casts a large shadow over the short and terrible twentieth century. In this collection of his selected speeches, some of which are translated into English for the first time, Solzhenitsyn offers his reflections and insights about role and purpose of art, the human need for God, and the forces from both East and West that seek to destroy the human spirit. We Have Ceased to See a Purpose is essential reading for those who wish to learn from one of the giants of twentieth-century world literature and understand the line that 'separates good and evil' in 'every human heart.'" —Lee Trepanier, co-editor of Walk Away

"This new collection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speeches invite a new generation of students and other readers to hear his provocative and prophetic arguments on key cultural, political, literary, and moral questions." —Matthew Lee Miller, author of The American YMCA and Russian Culture

"This welcome selection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most penetrating speeches appeal to, and renew, the 'sparks of the spirit' that alone offer hope in this and other troubled times." —Daniel J. Mahoney, co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader

"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn belongs to the select category of writers who not only chronicled global events, but actually shaped them. Part of an ongoing endeavor by the University of Notre Dame Press to make the writer’s legacy available to the English-speaking reader, this expertly curated collection brings together Solzhenitsyn’s most important speeches. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years after they were given, they continue to have the capacity to dazzle, engage, and surprise." —Richard Tempest, author of Overwriting Chaos

"The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. . . . He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient." —Commentary

"Solzhenitsyn’s most significant orations . . . He spoke not only to condemn ‘bestial Communism’ but also to explain what he perceived as the weaknesses and flaws of the modern West. . . His diagnosis has lost none of its resonance today." —National Review

"In We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the estimable musician and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn collects and annotates the ten most stirring public addresses of his father, Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." —Claremont Review of Books

"We Have Ceased to See the Purpose serves both to present forceful ideas relevant to today’s cultural catastrophe and help fill the remaining gaps in Solzhenitsyn’s works to be translated into English." —The Book Beat

"Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis leaps from the page and reaches across the decades to our recent political and cultural miasmas." —Civitas Outlook

"We Have Ceased to See the Purpose . . . shows Solzhenitsyn steadily developing a grand theory of history amid the contemporary goings-on that occasioned his speeches." —Law & Liberty

"Beauty will save the world, Solzhenitsyn keeps repeating, after Dostoyevsky. One of the world’s greatest artists and citizens, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did all he could to make this prophecy come true." —Wall Street Journal