Fifteen years before publication of Solzhenitsyn's most famous work, a 22-year-old Bob Dylan gleaned a startling truth about good and evil.

In 1963, Bob Dylan was a fresh-faced kid probably unrecognizable to most Americans, but he showed he was already an old soul when he delivered a speech in the Grand Ballroom of New York City's American Hotel that December.

It was about two weeks before Christmas, and Dylan was on hand to receive the Tom Paine Award, bestowed annually by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee to honor individuals for service in the fight for civil liberty.

It was a period of change, and Dylan had risen to fame in large part because of his protest songs of the period—such as the 1962 hit "Blowin' in the Wind"—that touched on themes related to the civil rights and anti-war movements.