The truth chronicles

There are two words for truth in Russian: pravda—as in the title of the Soviet newspaper—implies a contingent truth, derived from personal experience and reasoning; istina, however, suggests a more profound, eternal verity, unswayed by expediency and unchanged by circumstance. The tensions between these two conceptions of truth have obsessed Russian writers for centuries but few more so than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the moral scourge of the Soviet regime and chronicler of the Gulag.

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