An icon of his age
他所在时代的一个标志

Aug 4th 2008
From Economist.com

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn gives Russia a chance to reflect on authoritarianism
亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴之死给了俄罗斯一个反思其威权主义的机会

PROPHETS are without honour in their own country-at least until they die. For most of his adult life in the Soviet Union, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was persecuted. In exile in the West from 1974, his gloomy philippics and increasingly turgid prose aroused more bafflement than appreciation. After he returned to Russia in 1994, he was welcomed but then ignored.

先知通常在他们自己的国家没有什么荣誉–至少在他们死之前如此。亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴在苏联度过的大部分成年时光，都深受迫害。1974年之后流亡西方的日子里，索尔仁尼琴沉郁的抨击和日益冗长的散文引起了更多的困惑而不是欣赏。在他1994年回到俄罗斯后，他虽然很受欢迎但是却渐渐被人们遗忘了。

His death is a chance to make amends, although whether a Russia that is increasingly nostalgic for its totalitarian past will chose to take it is another matter. In an online poll (admittedly wildly unscientific) taken in recent weeks, the totalitarian leader Joseph Stalin is a front-runner for the title of greatest Russian. It was criticism of Stalin, expressed privately in a letter to a friend, that landed Mr Solzhenitsyn with an eight-year sentence in the camps. It counted for little that he was a twice-decorated artillery officer, on the front-line of the Red Army’s triumph over Nazi Germany.

他的死也许是弥补以往过失的一次机会，虽然日益怀念其旧时集权主义时代的俄罗斯是否会去那么做是另一回事了。在最近几周的一项网上调查投票中（并不科学），极权主义领袖约瑟夫•斯大林位于”最伟大的俄罗斯人”的前列。而正是由于在给一位朋友的信中私下里表达了对斯大林的批评，导致索尔仁尼琴先生被判在劳改营中服刑8年。而他曾上过苏联卫国战争前线，两次立功授勋的炮兵军官的身份显得无关紧要了。

Having experienced the crimes of Stalinism at first hand, he exposed them in both fiction and factual form. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, published in 1962, gave Soviet citizens their first opportunity to read about the brutality, squalor, humiliation and fear of daily life in a prison camp, all told in the matter-of-fact style of a Russian folk tale. “The Gulag Archipelago” described the system, its tortures, rules and subculture, in relentless, gruesome, encyclopedic form. Modern scholars, able to research the subject with a freedom that Mr Solzhenitsyn could never have dreamed of, say it is astonishingly accurate.

由于曾经亲身体验过斯大林主义的罪恶，索尔仁尼琴通过小说和纪实的形式将这些都暴露出来。1962年出版的《伊万•杰尼索维奇的一天》，让苏联国民能够第一次读到在战俘集中营中残酷、肮脏、备受羞辱和充满恐惧的生活。全书以俄罗斯民间故事的形式，实事求是地写出这些内容。《古拉格群岛》描述的系统，是充满折磨，统治和亚文化的，以一种无情的，可怕的，包罗万象的形式存在的系统。拥有索尔仁尼琴先生无法想象的自由来研究这个课题的现代学者说，《古拉格群岛》的描述是令人惊讶的准确。

His other books are more patchy. Although he detested the ravages of communist rule on Russian language and culture, the clunky techniques of Socialist Realism are all too visible in works such as “The Cancer Ward”. His later works are mostly panoramic histories of Russia in the past century that most readers found impenetrable. His latest work, a lengthy series of reflections on Jewish-Russian relations, prompted charges of anti-semitism that he furiously denied.

索尔仁尼琴其它的作品更加斑驳杂疏些。虽然他非常憎恨共产主义统治对于俄罗斯语言和文化的破坏，但是在他的作品中能够清晰地看到社会主义写实主义的技巧手法，例如他的《癌症病房》。他晚期的作品更多的是俄罗斯在过去的一个世纪的全景式的历史，多数读者都很难理解。他最后的作品是对犹太人和俄罗斯人关系的一个长系列的反思作品。这个作品引起了对其反犹太主义的指控，但是索尔仁尼琴坚决否认。

Mr Solzhenitsyn was a loyal communist in his youth. As a young man, he dreamed of writing a history of the Russian revolution, oblivious to the Stalinist terror going on around him. As a bright, young maths student, he once said he could easily have ended up being recruited by the NKVD, the secret police, to perpetrate terror. Instead he became its most potent critic. His political awakening came from long talks in prison with Arnold Susi, an Estonian lawyer jailed for being a minister in a non-communist government. That friendship survived for many years after both men were released.

索尔仁尼琴先生在年轻时代是个忠诚的共产主义者。作为一个年轻人，他的梦想是写一部俄国革命历史，但是他并未察觉斯大林主义恐怖阴影正在朝他而来。做为一个生气勃勃的年轻数学系学生，索尔仁尼琴曾说他最终会被内政部人民委员会警察（秘密警察，译者注：克格勃的前身）招录而去从事恐怖活动的。恰恰相反的是，他却成为其最大的抨击者。索尔仁尼琴的政治觉醒来自于在监狱中与阿诺德苏西的长期谈话。阿诺德苏西是爱沙尼亚的一位律师，由于曾在非共产党政府中担任部长而被监禁。在他们俩人都被释放后，这段友谊还持续了好多年。

As well as the gulag, Mr Solzhenitsyn’s titanic willpower triumphed over other adversaries: cancer, censorship and Soviet bureaucratic intimidation. In 1970 he won the Nobel prize for literature, but declined to accept it in person for fear that he would not be allowed to return to the Soviet Union. But by 1974, the Soviet authorities had had enough: he was bundled onto a plane to West Germany, to spend two decades abroad. Those in the West who had championed his cause were disconcerted to find that he saw the capitalist system as little better than communism. He denounced materialism and moral emptiness, and lived in increasing seclusion in a remote corner of New England.

就像对待古拉格一样，索尔仁尼琴先生强大的意志力战胜了其它许多敌人：癌症，审查制度，苏联官僚主义威胁。1970年他获得了诺贝尔文学奖，但是他个人由于担心不被允许返回苏联而拒绝接受。但是在1974年，苏联当局对他受够了：将他塞入一架飞往西德的飞机，让他流亡海外20年。索尔仁尼琴先生认为资本主义系统并不比共产主义好多少，那些在西方支持他事业的人对此深感不安。他公开指责物质主义和道德空虚，而且渐渐地将自己隐遁于新英格兰的一个偏远的角落里。

As communism collapsed, his books, once read only in flimsy, blurred carbon copies, could all be published legally inside the Soviet Union. But he detested the man who brought that about: Boris Yeltsin, the first freely-elected leader in Russia’s history, spurning his offer of a state decoration. He could not, he said accept honours from a man who had brought misery on his people.

随着苏联共产主义的垮台，曾经以模糊的碳迹印在轻薄纸上流传的索尔仁尼琴的作品可以合法的在苏联国内出版了。但索尔仁尼琴先生却憎恨能够使这些发生的那个人–俄罗斯历史上首位自由选举的领袖，鲍瑞斯•叶利钦，并拒绝了要授予他国家勋章的请求。索尔仁尼琴说他不能接受一个给他人民带来痛苦的人给他的荣誉。

To the consternation of some of his supporters, he did accept an award from the ex-KGB officer who became Mr Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin. He even seemed to downplay Mr Putin’s role in the KGB, saying that every country needed an intelligence service. Yet, although he praised the self-respect and stability that Russia had regained under Mr Putin, he remained deeply critical of its politics and the corruption and greed that capitalism had exposed and fuelled.

令他的支持者惊讶的是，他竟然接受了一个前克格勃官员，叶利钦的继任者弗拉基米尔•普京给予他的荣誉。他甚至淡化普京在克格勃里的角色，他说每个国家都需要一个情报系统。虽然他称赞普京使俄罗斯赢回了其自尊和稳定，但是他依然猛烈抨击其政治和资本主义暴露并且助长的腐败和贪婪。

That message, often delivered in sententious, near messianic tones, had little appeal. A television programme consisting largely of all but unwatchable monologues lingered painfully on the airwaves and then died, unlamented. Few read his books.

这些信息通常以警世名言，接近救世主的语气发出，却鲜有吸引力。一个主要由大段的不忍卒读的独白组成电视节目以电波形式在空间痛苦地徘徊，然后消逝，而且无人哀悼。很少有人读他的书。

But his death is a chance for Russia’s rulers to say what they think about totalitarianism. Was the collapse of the Soviet Union the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century? Or is the real disaster the failure of an independent Russia to cast off the chains of authoritarianism and empire? If Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, goes beyond simply offering condolences to the Solzhenitsyn family, his thoughts on that would be eagerly awaited.

但是他的死给了俄罗斯统治者一次机会来表达他们对于极权主义的看法。苏联的垮台是上个世纪的一次”地缘政治灾难”吗？或者真正的灾难是独立的俄罗斯脱离威权主义和帝国的失败？如果俄罗斯的新总统德米特里•梅德韦杰夫不是简单的去索尔仁尼琴家吊唁死者，那么他对于上述问题的看法值得期待。

译者：rushor     http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13094&highlight=

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴

Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author and dissident, died on August 3rd, aged 89
亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴，俄罗斯作家、持不同政见者，于8月3日去世，终年89岁

PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent-an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside.

人们知道那个地方：广阔无垠令人惊异的古拉格。”虽然它是星罗棋布的群岛，但是在心理上，它已经被融合成一块大陆–一块几乎看不见又难以触摸的大陆。” 随着一辆辆火车的进入，内务部的人被派去管理这里。在亚历山大•索尔仁尼琴到过那里之前，这个地方很少被外界所了解。索尔仁尼琴曾在那里度过了八年的岁月，在那里烧砖打铁，听着狱友像老鼠一样在晚上偷他的食物，因为很小的错误就被带上手拷。《古拉格群岛》是一本揭示”对我曾有切肤之痛的”集中营的书，并为仍在其中的人做出见证。

Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time.

自从1973年这本书首次出现，索尔仁尼琴立即被苏联驱逐出境。但是他的工作完成了。他暴露了这个体系的裂缝。自从十一年前赫鲁晓夫开始解禁文学，索尔仁尼琴在《新世界》杂志上发表的《伊万•杰尼索维奇的一天》标志着真理论述的开始。这个故事以监狱里刺耳的起床号开始，”锤子打击长横木的声音”穿透结着两指厚冰霜的窗户。在这样穿过不易透过物体的声响下，俄罗斯人民打开了个人崇拜的潘多拉盒子，并在相当长一段时间内为此而活着。在这之后，虽然仍有非常的迟钝，但是苏联解体只是个时间问题了。

He was not another Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Often the characters in Mr Solzhenitsyn’s books were one-dimensional, the tone sardonic, the detail turgid. But his indestructibility gave him, over the years, a prophet’s voice. He survived the war, the camps and abdominal cancer that was carelessly treated. He was told he would never have children, but had three sons. He believed he would never return to Russia after his exile, but in 1994 was welcomed back to the post-Soviet state. Each miracle increased his sense of mission. He was not simply a writer, but a visionary who would mend Russia; and, as such, he believed he was on equal terms with Soviet leaders. In 1973, in a letter to them, he laid out his proposals. There was nothing wrong with a Soviet empire; but they had to cast off “this filthy sweaty shirt” of Marxist ideology, all these “arsenals of lies”. Socialism, he wrote, “prevents the living body of the nation from breathing.”

他不是另一个托尔斯泰或者陀斯妥耶夫斯基。通常索尔仁尼琴书的特征是一维的–腔调讥讽，细节冗长。但是在过去很多年后，他的不可毁灭性给予了他先知的地位。他经历过战争，集中营和腹部癌症的考验，但是他都生存了下来。（他患癌症并未获得精心治疗）他曾被告知会终身不育，但是他却有三个孩子。他相信他在流亡之后再也无法返回俄罗斯，但是在1994年他却被欢迎返回那个后苏联国家。每一个奇迹都增加了他对使命的意义。他不仅仅是个作家，而且是有远见卓识的，能重振俄罗斯的人。而且，以其身份来说，他认为他和苏联领导人相当。在1973年他对苏联领导人的一封信中，他列出了他的建议。苏联帝国没有错，但是他们必须脱下马克思主义的”肮脏外衣”，和所有的”谎言的思想武库”。他写道，社会主义”阻止了这个国家生命的躯体的呼吸。”

Behind his impassive kulak’s face lay intense self-scrutiny, adamantine moral and physical courage and a sometimes unsettling disregard for the smaller and softer things in life. But he did not necessarily think he was better, or wiser, than other men. Only a fluke, he said, had kept him out of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, when they came recruiting at his university. As for the war, though the Nazis had unleashed atrocities on Russia, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder-straps and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?’” In one poem, “Prussian Nights”, he wrote:
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse

在他令人影响深刻的富农面孔的背后有着强烈的自我探究、坚定的道德力量、物质勇气以及有时对于世间渺小软弱事情的蔑视。但是他并不是必定地认为他比其它人更出色，更睿智。他说，由于一个很偶然的机遇，使他能够侥幸没有在大学校园里被斯大林的秘密警察–内政部人民委员会警察（译者注：克格勃的前身）招录。对于战争来说，虽然纳粹将邪恶的力量发泄到俄罗斯身上，”我记得我扛着我的上尉肩章在急行军中穿越东普鲁士，躲避着炮火，我喊着：‘我们还会更好吗？’” 在一首”普鲁士之夜”的诗里，他写道：

小小的女儿躺在床上
死亡。有多少死亡在这里
一排人，一连人？
一个女孩已经变成一个女人
一个女人已经变成一具死尸

Salvo after salvo rattled from the Solzhenitsyn typewriter, always interleaved with carbon copies for fear that the secret police would seize the manuscript. Some fell on deaf ears-wilfully deaf, in the case of the European left. The notion that Stalin was a great wartime leader, for example, should never have survived the devastating portrait of sickly paranoia in “The First Circle” (1969). Yet it has persisted to this day.

一行行的文字从索尔仁尼琴的打字机中嘎嘎敲出，通常隔行还备有副本，以防止秘密警察将其手稿夺走。有些人确故意装聋作哑，比如欧洲的左派。例如斯大林是个伟大的战时领袖的概念没有能够使得《第一圈》中对于患病偏执狂的引人注目的描写保留下来。甚至一直坚持到今天。

Though supporters in the West lumped Mr Solzhenitsyn with the rest of the intelligentsia, he stood monumentally alone. A friendship with an Estonian prisoner, Arnold Susi, had exploded his lingering belief in Marxism; but he detested the self-regarding and snooty Russian intellectuals, the “well-read ones”, as he referred to them. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, he had no belief in liberalism or human-rights campaigns. The fact that scientists might be deprived of visas left him unmoved. He cared about the fate of peasants and the general citizenry, Russians in the mass. Ivan Denisovich was not an intellectual: he was a peasant who was horrified to discover, in a letter from his wife, that the farmers in his village were now working in factories rather than haymaking. The creation of Soviet man was the horror Mr Solzhenitsyn chiefly wished to reverse.

虽然西方的支持者将索尔仁尼琴先生与其他知识界的人放到一起来考虑，但是他确实是特立独行。与一个爱沙尼亚的囚犯阿诺德•苏西的友谊打破了他对于马克思主义挥之不去的信念。但是他也非常憎恨利己主义这和被他称作”博学者”的媚上傲下的俄罗斯知识分子。与安德烈•萨哈罗夫（译者注：俄罗斯氢弹之父，诺贝尔奖获得者）不同，他对自由主义和人权运动没有信心。而实际上科学家被剥夺签证使他无法走动。他关心俄罗斯大部分农民和市民的命运。在他夫人给他的一封信中说：伊万•杰尼索维奇并不是个知识分子，而是一个让人吃惊的农民，他现在在他村子的工厂工作而不是在割晒干草。苏联创造的人是索尔仁尼琴先生最恐怖的事情，也是最想推翻的事情。

Neither East nor West
既非东方也非西方

Yet he had little time for the West either. Bundled on to a plane to West Germany in 1974, he turned his fire on other targets, thundering against materialism, shallowness and the silliness of popular Western culture. He would be no cold-war figurehead against the Kremlin and all its works; he was, to the core, a Russian nationalist. As communism fell he came to loathe Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s leader, seeing him as the author of chaos and humiliation. But bitterness and envy may have played a part, too. Bitterness because his hero’s welcome had turned into indifference to this dishevelled, hectoring, old-fashioned figure. And envy because Yeltsin stood in the place he should, he believed, have occupied himself.

然而他对西方的时间也很少。在1974年被塞进一架飞往西德的飞机后，他转移了他攻击的目标–他异乎寻常地反对物质主义，肤浅主义以及西方流行文化的愚蠢。他不是反对克里姆林宫的冷战傀儡，而是十足的俄罗斯爱国主义者。在共产主义垮台后，他开始憎恨俄罗斯领袖鲍瑞斯•叶利钦，把他看作俄罗斯混乱和羞辱的制造者。但是这其中也有悲愤和妒忌的原因。悲愤是由于他受到的英雄式的欢迎变成了对散乱和欺凌漠不关心的过时的形象。妒忌是因为叶利钦站在了他认为他应该站的位置。

译者：rushor    http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13227&extra=page%3D1

Speaking truth to power
不畏强权 仗义执言

Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s example-and the heirs who failed him
亚历山大索尔仁尼琴做出了榜样-但继承人们令其失望

GEORGE KENNAN, the dean of American diplomats, called “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Stalin’s terror, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times”. By bearing witness, Solzhenitsyn certainly did as much as any artist could to bring down the Soviet system, a monstrosity that crushed millions of lives. His courage earned him imprisonment and exile. But his death on August 3rd (see article) prompts a question. Who today speaks truth to power-not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?
美国外交界领袖乔治凯南曾经说过，”《古拉格群岛》”，亚历山大索尔仁尼琴叙述斯大林恐怖统治的著作，”是对现代某一政体最强有力的指控。”通过讲述其目击之事，索尔仁尼琴沉痛地打击了苏维埃体系，展现了艺术家良心的极致。他的勇气令他遭受了监禁和流放。但8月3日他的逝世向我们提出了一个问题。当今世界还有谁不畏强权仗义执言？-不仅仅指在极权国家或者半自由国家诸如俄罗斯和中国，而且也指在西方。

The answer in the case of Russia itself is depressing. Russia’s contemporary intelligentsia-the should-be followers of the example of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the other dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period-is not just supine but in some ways craven (see article). Instead of defending the freedoms perilously acquired after the end of communism, many of Russia’s intellectuals have connived in Vladimir Putin’s project to neuter democracy and put a puppet-show in its place. Some may genuinely admire Mr Putin’s resurrection of a “strong” Russia (as, alas, did the elderly Solzhenitsyn himself). But others have shallower motives.
这一问题在俄罗斯的答案令人沮丧。俄罗斯当代知识分子-这些理应成为索尔仁尼琴继承者的人，萨哈罗夫和其他苏维埃时期的异议知识分子-不仅懒惰而且在某些方面非常懦弱。许多俄罗斯知识分子不仅没有不遗余力地捍卫共产主义终结之后所得到的自由，反而对弗拉基米尔普金阉割民主，上演一出又一出木偶剧的行为表示了默许。有些人也许是真心希望普金能够重建一个”强大”的俄罗斯（年迈的索尔仁尼琴就是如此）。但其他人支持普金的动机就浅薄了很多。

In Soviet times telling the truth required great courage and brought fearful consequences. That is why the dissidents were a tiny minority of the official intelligentsia which the Soviet Union created mainly in order to build its nuclear technology. Today it is not for the most part fear that muzzles the intellectuals. Speaking out can still be dangerous, as the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, showed. But what lurks behind the silence of many is not fear but appetite: an appetite to recover the perks and status that most of the intelligentsia enjoyed as the Soviet system’s loyal servant.
苏维埃时期讲真话需要极大的勇气，并且往往会带来极其可怕的后果。这就是为什么官方知识分子当中异议者只占其中一小部分的原因-当初苏联成立这一官方知识界主要是为了建立自身的核工业。今天广大知识分子缄默不言很大程度上并不是因为上述原因。虽然2006年调查记者安娜•波利特科夫斯卡娅被谋杀说明讲真话仍然很危险。但大部分知识分子选择沉默并不是因为害怕而是因为贪婪：希望有着一日能够得到自己梦寐以求的至高无上的身份与地位，成为苏维埃体系的忠诚仆人。

The problem of authoritarianism
极权主义的弊端

In China the intellectuals’ silence is easier to forgive because voicing dissent is still sharply controlled. For all its new openness, China has created few opportunities for Solzhenitsyn-type greats to emerge. It has tolerated a modicum of writing about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, but then the government too now says the Cultural Revolution was horrific. You would search in vain in China itself for literature about the misery of the 1950s after the communists took over, or the deaths of tens of millions in the famine of the early 1960s. The window opened a bit in the 1980s, but the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 banished free thinking well into the 1990s.
在中国知识分子的沉默更容易得到原谅，因为直言不讳的异议者仍然被严密的控制着。虽然不断加大开放力度，但中国出现像索尔仁尼琴这样伟大的人物的可能性不大。它虽然可以接受对恐怖的文化大革命的零星记述，但现在即使是中国政府也承认文化大革命的可怕。如果你想在中国调查1950年共产党接管大陆后发生的悲剧，或者60年代早期导致几千万人饿死的饥荒，其结果一定是徒劳无功的。虽然80年代时，政府控制有一定程度的放开，但1989年发生的天安门事件禁止了自由思考进入90年代。

The emergence of the internet and a market-driven publishing industry has changed China less than it should. Several intellectuals post critical views of the party online. A good example is Hu Xingdou, an academic who lays into the party at every opportunity. But not even he goes as far as to call for the end of one-party rule. In 2004 a Chinese newspaper caused a stir by publishing a list of 50 public intellectuals. They included Gao Yaojie, who helped expose an AIDS epidemic in Henan, Wen Tiejun, who has written about the suffering of peasants, and He Weifang, a law professor who has spoken out about the rights of the marginalised, such as migrant workers.
互联网和受市场驱动的出版业的出现改变了中国，但只是在一定程度上。一些知识分子在网络上发表对共产党的批评。胡星斗就是个很好的例子，一个抓住一切机会攻击共产党的知识分子。但即使是他也不敢倡导结束一党专政。2004年一家报纸刊登了50 位公共知识分子的名单，引起了不小的轰动。其中包括高耀洁，她揭露了河南省的爱滋病现状。温铁军，讲述了农民的悲惨现状。贺卫方，他为边缘人群比如民工争取合法权利极力奔走。

These are impressive people, to whom China will one day be grateful. But the voices of the dissidents count for less than they did in the 1980s. China then, like the Soviet Union, was a bleak place with little other intellectual stimulation. People yearned for provocative ideas. Now access to information is freer, the economy is flourishing and for a lot of intellectuals life is good. China has its bold thinkers, but in its present mood it is hard to imagine one of them galvanising an entire class the way Solzhenitsyn did.
这都是些令人印象深刻的人，中国总有一天会感谢他们。但现在的异议声音远没有80年代时那样响亮。当时的中国如果苏联一样，是一个阴郁的国家，知识界惨淡压抑。人民渴望具有煽动性的观点。而现在人民获取信息更加自由，经济蓬勃发展，许多知识分子的生活非常惬意。中国自有其勇敢的思考者，但从现今的状况来看，很难想像从他们中间会出现一个向索尔仁尼琴那样，能够激励一个阶级采取行动的伟人。

It is a bit too easy for people in the West to deplore the failure of intellectuals living in unfree societies to follow the example of a Solzhenitsyn. Such stories are rare. His arose from an unusual confluence: a great crime, a great silence, a receptive audience and personal courage well above the ordinary. There are parts of the Islamic world where secular thinkers, such as Egypt’s Nobel novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, have faced violence for daring to prick a suffocating conformity. The Western intellectual, by contrast, enjoys a charmed existence. In France, which pampers its men of ideas, De Gaulle is reputed to have ordered the release of the inflammatory Jean-Paul Sartre in 1968 by remarking, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Most democracies have pulled off the remarkable feat of creating in the universities a class of tenured academics whose salaries are paid by the state but who are free, and often inclined, to savage the hand that feeds them. Nice work, if you can get it.
生活在不自由的社会当中的知识分子不能追随索尔仁尼琴，西方人民往往片面地对此感到惋惜。事实上，索尔仁尼琴这样的例子非常罕见。他是诸多非常因素作用的结果：涛天的罪行，死寂的沉默，一个善于接受新思想的听众和异于常人的勇气。伊斯兰世界的有些地方，世俗思考者，比如说埃及的诺贝尔文学奖获得者小说家马哈福兹，如果敢批评它们世界那令人窒息的一致性，就很可能受到暴力袭击。与此形成鲜明对比的是，西方知识分子却享受着令人欣喜的自由。法国向来鼓励人民自由思考。戴高乐曾经因为命令释放发展煽动议论的让保罗萨特而闻名，他说”你不会逮捕伏尔泰。”许多民主政体已经完成了一项引人注目的事业，它们成功地在大学培养出一班长期聘用的知识分子，他们领国家的薪水但却享有思想自由，而且往往倾向于批评自己的衣食父母。如果你能得到这样一份工作的话，其实这活儿挺不错的。

The problem of democracy
民主的弊端

The West has printed a lorryload of angst-ridden books about the demise of the intellectual. Political correctness and academic over-specialisation have indeed hurt the quality of much that is said in the media and taught in the universities. But at the root of most complaints is the supposed problem of surplus. Authoritarian places nurture a class of recognised intellectuals whose utterances are both carefully listened to and strictly controlled. Democracies produce a cacophony, in which each voice complains that its own urgent message is being drowned in a sea of pap. “Repressive tolerance”, one ungrateful 1960s radical called it. It would cause not a ripple if MIT’s famous intellectual subversive, Noam Chomsky, were invited to speak to the annual capitalist jamboree in Davos.
西方世界已经印行了许多焦燥不安的书籍，讨论知识分子的消亡。政治正确和学术的过分专业化的确损害了媒体言论和大学教育的质量。但是大多数抱怨的根源却是意见泛滥。极权政体培养了一批有着自我认知的知识分子，他们的言论被仔细倾听，严密控制。民主政体产生了意见的喧嚣，所有人都在抱怨一些急迫的诉求被淹没在言论的海洋里。”残酷的压抑，”一位60年代满腹不满的激进派这样是称呼它的。即使麻省理工学院那位知名的颠覆分子诺亚乔姆斯基受邀到年度资本主义盛会达沃斯论坛发表演讲，恐怕也不一定能引起多少人注意。

The cacophony is the lesser evil. Ideas should not be suppressed, but nor should they be worshipped. Kennan was right to call “Gulag” a powerful indictment of a regime. Remember, though, that in 1848 two well-meaning intellectuals published another powerful indictment of a system, and their “Communist Manifesto” went on to enslave half mankind. There is no sure defence against bad ideas, but one place to start is with a well-educated and sceptical citizenry that is free to listen to the notions of the intellectuals but is not in thrall to them-and, yes, may prefer the sports channel instead. The patrician in Solzhenitsyn hated this lack of deference in the West. That is one respect in which the great man was wrong.
意见喧嚣没有那么邪恶。意见不应该受到压制，但也不应该受到崇拜。凯南把《古拉格群岛》称为对一个政体强有力的指控是很正确的。但要记住，早在1848年就有两位善意的知识分子发表过对某一体系的强有力指控，他们的《共产党宣言》随后使全世界一半的人民沦为奴隶。对于坏思想我们没有明确有抵制方法。但至少应该从如下开始：全社会有着受过良好教育，具有思辨精神的公民，他们可以自由的听取知识分子的各种理念，但又不会受到这些理念的束缚-虽然，他们往往喜欢体育频道。索尔仁尼琴当中的贵族成分认为西方缺乏对俄罗斯的尊重。这是一个伟人错误的地方。

译者：xsj191     http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13188&extra=page%3D1
本文同样优秀的另一篇译文（译者：topsun），请点击：http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13221&extra=page%3D1