No, all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, or economic growth. Victorious technological civilization has simultaneously instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Certainly, its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well. All is interests, we must not neglect our interests, all is a struggle for material things; but an inner voice faintly prompts us that we’ve lost something pure, elevated—and fragile. We have ceased to see the purpose.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,” September 14, 1993 

In We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the estimable musician and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn collects and annotates the ten most stirring public addresses of his father, Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Most of them were delivered during Solzhenitsyn’s 20 years of forced exile in the West between 1974 and 1994. At that time, he was perhaps better known for these speeches than for his properly artistic and historical works—except, of course, for The Gulag Archipelago (1973),