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A study of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn¿s prose that examines his most important characters as well as his treatment of Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian revolution; surprising predilection for literary puzzles and games; erotic themes; and polemical interactions with Russian and Western modernism.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations and
Transliterations
Preface
Timeline of Solzhenitsyn’s
Life and Works
Part
One: The Writer In Situ
1. The Quilted Jerkin:
Solzhenitsyn’s Life and Art
2. Ice, Squared: “One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
3. “Turgenev Never Knew”: The
Shorter Fictions of the 1950s and 1960s
4. Meteor Man: Love the Revolution
5. Helots and Heroes: In the First Circle
6. Rebel versus Rabble: Cancer Ward
Part
Two: The Writer Ex Situ
7. Twilight of All the
Russias: The Red Wheel
8. Return: The Shorter
Fictions of the 1990s
9: Modernist?
Appendix. Three Interviews
with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2003–7)
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Richard Tempest is an associate professor at the University of Illinois who studies the interactions between Russian and Western culture. His novel Zolotaya kost, about the adventures of a time-traveling American professor, was published in Moscow in 2004. Tempest¿s current research focuses on charismatic politics in the twenty-first century.
Summary
Richard Tempest examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s evolution as a literary artist from his early autobiographical novel Love the Revolution to the experimental mega-saga The Red Wheel, and beyond. Tempest shows how this author gives his characters a presence so textured that we can readily imagine them as figures of flesh and blood and thought and feeling. The study discusses Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian Revolution; surprising predilection for textual puzzles and games à la Nabokov or even Borges; exploration of erotic themes; and his polemical interactions with Russian and Western modernism. Also included is new information about the writer’s life and art provided by his family, as well as Tempest’s interviews with him in 2003-7.
Additional text
“Richard Tempest’s book is a wide-ranging study of
Solzhenitsyn’s prose texts in the context of the Russian and Western literary
traditions. … On the pages of
this book Solzhenitsyn emerges not only as a writer (even though he is
primarily considered as such), but also as a reader, traveller, paterfamilias,
and a victim of (and victor over) the chaos of history. On top of it all,
Tempest shares his own phone interviews with Solzhenitsyn (the full texts are
attached in an appendix of the book), as well as encounters and conversations
with the writer’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, which adds to the lively and
comprehensive nature of this scholarly treatise.”
—Anna Arkatova, Hong Kong
Baptist University, UIC College, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies
