Literature

This choice at the end of the century has, however, also another purport. The Prizes to Hesse, Gide, Eliot, and Faulkner introduced a half-century of new competence for the difficult mission. The Prize is an indication of how far the jury has managed to make the Prize for Literature a literary award. The reference to moral values at the expense of experimental art in would be hard to imagine in the present Academy. We also notice the explicit disregard of the political implications that made Grass's last novel an apple of discord in his country. The Literary Prize has made an instructive journey. At the beginning of the new century it has become the Literary Prize that its name announces.

The purely literary criteria that have determined the standpoints adopted by the Committee have also varied from one period to another and this too is reflected in its reports. However this is a subject that, like the impact of trends in literary criticism and the history of ideas on its work, lies beyond the scope of this survey.

For a while there was talk of handing over the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. However, the conditions that the Swedish ambassador, Gunnar Jarring, and the Swedish government under Olof Palme put up were unacceptable to Solzhenitsyn. The Swedes proposed a private transaction. They excluded a public ceremony open to all the friends and other guests that Solzhenitsyn wanted to invite and a public lecture by Solzhenitsyn.

The Laureate answered that the conditions were insult to the Nobel Prize itself and wondered if the Prize was "something to be ashamed of, something to be concealed from the people.This experience left Solzhenitsyn with a deep sense of humiliation, both from the condescending way he was received when he twice visited the embassy to seek advice, and by the cowardly way a prize ceremony at the embassy was to be handled.