During his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for Literature, author of One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward said:
The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another… Literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience… from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1970
