Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko? Alexander Pushkin? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: A political activist once indicated that standing up for the truth was nothing, whereas sitting in jail for the truth reflected genuine commitment. I do not recall the precise phrasing.
This notion has been attributed to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I have been unable to find a citation. Would you please help me?
Reply from Quote Investigator: The English edition of “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was published in 1974. Solzhenitsyn presented a portrait of the prison system of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn described the viewpoint of his fellow prisoner Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Fastenko, on the other hand, was the most cheerful person in the cell, even though, in view of his age, he was the only one who could not count on surviving and returning to freedom.
Flinging an arm around my shoulders, he would say:
To stand up for the truth is nothing!
For truth you have to sit in jail!Or else he taught me to sing this song from Tsarist hard-labor days:
And if we have to perish
In mines and prisons wet,
Our cause will ever find renown
In future generations yet.And I believe this! May these pages help his faith come true!
Thus, Solzhenitsyn helped to popularize this saying, but it was spoken by Fastenko who had been imprisoned by the Tsar’s police and later by the communists.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In July 1974 the “Jewish Advocate” of Boston, Massachusetts published a book review by Sylvia Rothschild of “The Gulag Archipelago”. Rothschild attributed the saying to the prominent Russian writer Alexander Pushkin:2
Prison, for Solzhenitsyn, was a turning point. He was punished when an officer for wishing to remedy some of the brutalities. Any criticism of the State was a crime. “To stand up for the truth is nothing,” said one of Pushkin’s characters. “For truth you have to sit in jail.” So he sat among good company, as well as among thieves, murderers and real enemies of the State.
QI has not yet found any substantive evidence supporting the attribution to Pushkin.
In 1985 “The Toronto Star” published a letter to the editor which attributed the quotation to Fastenko:3
Perhaps this poignant observation by Solzhenitsyn’s cellmate Fastenko can be of some solace to Brodsky: “To stand up for the truth is nothing. For truth you have to sit in jail!”
In conclusion, QI believes Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko deserves credit for this quotation based on the testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is conceivable to Fastenko heard it from someone else, but QI has not found support for that possibility.
Image Notes: Picture of barbed wire together with a daisy from Mandy Naleli at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Kurt Foster whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1974, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney, Chapter 5: First Cell, First Love, Quote Page 202, Harper & Row, New York.(Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1974 July 18, Jewish Advocate, Reviews and Reflections by Sylvia Rothschild, (Review of “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Quote Page 15, Column 1, Boston, Massachusetts. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 1985 December 21, The Saturday Star (The Toronto Star), Section: Letter to the Editor, Letter Title: ‘Nobel Prize winners a poor choice indeed’, Letter From: N. Duroumis of Toronto, Quote Page B3, Column 6, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎