The raw material of life fills us with dismal presentiments.

It carries within itself a persistent echo of the painful

features in our national development related to the cult of

personality that has been debunked and repudiated by the party,

features that, although they are not so far away from

us in time, nevertheless seem to us to be in the distant past.

But our past experience, no matter what it was like,

never becomes a matter of indifference to the present moment.

The assurance of a complete break with the past lies

in a true and courageous comprehension of its full consequences.

______________________________________

Paraphrases from Foreward by Alexander Tvardovsky to the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.