Alexander Solzhenitsyn's “Nobel lecture” as his aesthetic credo

The aim of the article is to present Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Nobel Lecture" (1972) as an aesthetic key to his oeuvre. The novelty of the study is that it views Solzhenitsyn’s “Nobel Lecture" as a central element of his metatext for the first time. The paper provides a comparative analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s “Nobel" statements, fragments of his journalistic speeches, the diary and literary texts written before and after receiving the Nobel Prize. The author of the article focuses on studying Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetics and demonstrates how the writer translates his own “theoretical" understanding of the aesthetic literary tasks into some stable criteria for the assessment of other writers’ works. The universality and subjectivity of Solzhenitsyn’s criteria are inseparable: his artistic experience before and after the “Nobel Lecture" is diverse, deep, aesthetically and historically predictive, and unified in the consistent implementation of the stated credo. The research is based on Solzhenitsyn’s journalistic and literary texts, as well as his diary. The presented research is important for understanding Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetic principles and his metapoetics. It can help students, researchers and readers understand Solzhenitsyn’s phenomenon.