Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Stewart]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918 - died August 3, 2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. That year, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature. He is the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a well-known conductor and pianist.

The bibliography below is only a selection of his works, most of which appears to be essays, addresses, and pamphlets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962; novel)
• An Incident at Krechetovka Station (1963; novella)
• Matryona's Place (1963; novella)
• For the Good of the Cause (1964; novella)
• The First Circle (1968; novel)
• The Cancer Ward (1968; novel)
• The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969; play)
• August 1914 (1971)
• The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes) (1973–1978)
• Prussian Nights (1974, poetry)
• The Oak and the Calf (1975)
• November 1916 (1983; novel)
• Victory Celebration (1983)
• Prisoners (1983)
• August 1914 (1984; novel, expanded edition)

RELATED LINKS

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Wikipedia
• Biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Irene Wilde]

Just read this on the Associated Press:

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
NEW YORK - An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.
"`The First Circle' is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory," Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said Tuesday in a statement.
Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release "The First Circle" in 2009. The 89-year-old Solzhenitsyn, winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize for literature, returned to his homeland in the 1990s after two decades in exile and now lives in Moscow.
The novel, completed in 1964 and banned by Soviet officials even after Solzhenitsyn cut nine chapters, is set in a gulag where scientists and scholars have been sent for alleged subversion against the Stalinist regime. A shortened, 580-page version of "The First Circle" came out in English in 1968 ? the text had mysteriously been leaked out of the Soviet Union ? despite objections by the author, who believed his work was being exploited for profit, and by scholars who feared that the book's release could jeopardize his safety.
Solzhenitsyn's struggles ? at one point, the manuscript of his novel was seized by the KGB ? set off an extended Cold War debate and assured "The First Circle" a welcome reception in the United States. The Book-of-the-Month Club made it a featured selection and the announced first printing was 200,000.
New York Times reviewer Thomas Lask called the book "at once classic and contemporary. Reading it, we know that it has been with us for years, just as we know future generations will read it with wonder and with awe."
The full edition has long been available in Russian; mortality, not censorship, helped delay its U.S. release.
According to Harper Perennial editor Peter Hubbard, Solzhenitsyn approved a new English text a few years ago and commissioned his favorite translator, Harry T. Willetts, who had worked on Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." But Willetts died in 2005, not long after completing the translation and the publisher "went through some edits with Solzhenitsyn. It took a little time for the book to make its way to us," Hubbard told The Associated Press.
Imprisoned in his 20s for alleged anti-Soviet crimes, Solzhenitsyn became famous worldwide in 1962 with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a short novel set in a Siberian labor camp and at the time a shockingly blunt attack against the Soviet system. Then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev personally approved the book's release, but he was ousted in 1964, censorship tightened and Solzhenitsyn's work was suppressed for years.

[Mirabell]

The uncut version has been published in German a while ago.

ha. sometimes we're lucky.

[Eric]

Just read that Solzenitsyn has died:

Kultur - Berliner Morgenpost

[Eric]

The BBC's got it as well now, and other papers:

BBC NEWS | News Front Page

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etc.

[Stewart]

The BBC's got it as well now...

Bizarrely, the scrolling text on BBC News 24 is going with "The Nobel Peace Prize Winning author, Alexander Solzenhitsyn, has died aged 89 from a stroke." Fifth most important item in their headlines.

But that's three major Soviet writers down for this year, when you count Yuri Ryktheu and Chingiz Aitmatov. I hope his death serves a purpse in getting his work back in print.

[abecedarian]

Bizarrely, the scrolling text on BBC News 24 is going with "The Nobel Peace Prize Winning author, Alexander Solzenhitsyn, has died aged 89 from a stroke." Fifth most important item in their headlines.

But that's three major Soviet writers down for this year, when you count Yuri Ryktheu and Chingiz Aitmatov. I hope his death serves a purpse in getting his work back in print.

I'm seriously thinking of blowing the dust off my copy of The Gulag Archipelago and seeing what the great one had to say about Stalin...Didn't realize Yuri Rytheu had died; A Dream in Polar Fog is a beautiful book.

[Mirabell]

I once saw an interview on Russian TV with him, where he talked about his language and the words he uses, and it was incredibly inspiring.

[Eric]

It's sad to see the passing of such a major writer. But he did survive the Soviet labour camps to live to a ripe old age, when you think of the millions that died in them, or on the way there. (Though you can see from that photo from this June, when Putin visited him, that he was very ill.)

The positive side of his death (death always gets the journos scribbling) is that once again the world will be reminded what happened in Stalinist Russia to perfectly normal, innocent people who opened their mouths and said (or wrote) too much. So, like Stewart, I hope his works are now reprinted and, above all, read and understood. Though as I said earlier, even the short "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" gives a pretty good idea of the camps.

Another thing to note is that "Gulag Archipelago" is a work of non-fiction, not a novel. If you read that book in conjunction with Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" you can get an idea of what the camps meant. While Applebaum concentrates of the industrial scale of the whole enterprise, with Solzhenitsyn, you get a good idea of the background, the arrests, the interrogation & investigation, the nature and length of the prison & camp sentences, etc. The whole mentality of state terror is unveiled (paranoia, xenophobia, intolerance, total control, informers, barbaric punishments). That's what important about the book.

After a short thaw under Khrushchev, they started persecuting the likes of Solzhenitsyn again, so he ultimately had to leave the country, or go back to the Gulag.

Imagine if they treated you like that in Britain! Criticise the government or the ruling class, and you find yourself in a work camp in northern Scotland for a decade, chopping down trees for the profit of the state. But in Russia it is a tradition. Dostoevsky (Siberia) and Chekhov (Sakhalin) were aware of the same sorts of labour camps back in Czarist times. So although Solzhenitsyn is describing the system and mentality from the Russian Revolution onwards in Gulag Archipelago, it was already in place under the czars during the 19th century. Some things don't change.

[Stewart]

I once saw an interview on Russian TV with him, where he talked about his language and the words he uses, and it was incredibly inspiring.

What did he say?

[Stewart]

Donald Rayfield, emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen May University, London, writes about Solzhenitsyn's literary legacy on the Guardian blog.

A literary assessment of Solzhenitsyn's life work will be selective and sometimes harsh. The short stories and novellas of the 1960s are written very powerfully, combining personal witness with forthright clarity.
...
The historical cycle Red Wheel is, even to admirers almost unreadable in its mass of detail and its tendency to rant, not narrate. Solzhenitsyn's political views, scattered in hundreds of newspaper articles, are naive, offensive and often ignorant.

[Eric]

I hope those of you who are too young to remember the Cold War personally, and can read German, will buy the Spiegel Special Geschichte, entitled Der Kalte Krieg (3/2008), and read it without protesting too much that it is bourgeois propaganda, financed by the CIA and the capitalist classes. This is the atmosphere that Solzhenitsyn lived in for a large part of his postwar life. It puts his whole protest in context.

It is an excellent overview of the epoch from 1945 to 1991:

http://www.spiegelgruppe.de/spiegelg...Document&Click=

SPIEGEL Special - Der kalte Krieg 03/2008 ungelesen der bei eBay.de: Politik Wissenschaft (endet 11.08.08 20:52:39 MESZ)

Donald Rayfield is no doubt knowledgeable, but he looks like another literature buff who has strayed into the historical and geo-political minefield. A few historians should be consulted, as well as a language & literature man (with a penchant for Georgian).

Read the following review of one of Rayfield's books:

CONTEXT - This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times

[Eric]

I wonder what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought about Georgians. I guarantee I know of one he wasn't wild about: Yosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili...

[Eric]

Did any of you see the programme called "Alexander Solzhenitsyn - The Homecoming" on BBC2 last night? It was very good. His wife looked as if she wore the trousers in the house, whether that dwelling was in Vermont or Moscow.

[liehtzu]

There's an interesting, if not entirely successful, documentary by Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov about Solzhenitsyn called Dialogues With Solzhenitsyn:

DinaView Blog Archive Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (1999, Russia) Aleksandr Sokurov

For those who don't want to go through the trouble of locating the out-of-print DVD, the whole thing is available (in almost twenty 10-minute parts) on YouTube. Frustrating to watch this movie, as Sokurov obviously adores his subject - but, God, what different questions I would have asked! Also, Sokurov is a bit of an odd duck, and towards the end of the film the writer is visibly uncomfortable with the man's continued presence in his house. Still, still, some nuggets. Solzhenitsyn is quite old, and sometimes Sokurov will ask him questions and the writer doesn't answer, seems to drift off for thirty seconds or a minute, and you wonder: Did he not hear? Is he a touch senile? then he'll produce an answer and you realize that in this television age the man has actually taken the time to think about the question, to roll it around in his head for awhile and digest it before answering. Marvelous!

Solzhenitsyn, whose reputation has seen a ludicrous falling off in the West (as well as in Russia, from what I've read), has been on my mind quite a bit for nearly a year now, since I picked up a book in the bargain bin in Bangkok called Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials from the early '70s. This, before I'd even read much of his writing, confronted a lot of the aesthetic matters that had been on my mind (Does literature have a "duty" to society? etc) and which I highly recommend even to those who aren't especially familiar with the writer. There are essays by two future Nobel winners (two by Heinrich Boll, one of Solzhenitsyn's strongest supporters in the West, and one by Czeslaw Milosz about why Solzhenitsyn's Nobel speech, "one of the great documents of our time," went practically unnoticed in the American press), American writers, Russian dissidents, etc about the Solzhenitsyn phenomenon written while the author at the height of his popularity. There are also translations of the Nobel Speech and a few other stray things, translated by Alexis Klimoff (and I like this translation much better than the one on the Nobel website). Klimoff also does a depressing overview of the then-current translations of the author's works into English. Fortunately later translations of many of Solzhenitsyn's works were done by Harry Willets, who met with the Klimoff seal of approval (Klimoff wrote an introduction to Willets's translation of One Day).

There is also a sequel to the book, Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, that came out at the author's low ebb; I haven't read it.

Three of the finest essays from the first volume were written by Alexander Schmemann. Two of them (but not my favorite, "A Lucid Love") can be found here:

http://www.communio-icr.com/articles...memann35-3.pdf

[Heteronym]

I can't get into Solzhenitsyn. Or rather, I don't know where to start. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is a short little novel, although it's hardly great, but everything else seems huge and endless. The Red Wheel cycle is composed of four huge novels (some divided into two volumes), and The Gulag Archipelago is another monster of a cycle of books.

Sometimes a reader just wants to read a book and be done with it.

[beelzebubbles]

Liehtzu, thanks for the heads up about the documentary.

[Liam]

There's an interesting, if not entirely successful, documentary by Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov about Solzhenitsyn

It has to be stressed that Sokurov is, first and foremost, an experimental filmmaker (and that includes his documentaries, too)--anyone who's sat through his 5-hour Afghan War "documentary" Spiritual Voices (and I have) can testify to it, so don't expect anything linear, flowing and straightforward. I haven't seen this particular film (about Solzhenitsyn) but I wouldn't be surprised if it came across as a bit strange--I've come to expect that from Sokurov.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is a short little novel, although it's hardly great.

Actually, many people consider this his most profound work, along with the short-story "Matryona's House," and I happen to agree. It is also a good place to start, and then move on to other things if Solzhenitsyn happens to catch your fancy. Not sure how well his prose travels between different languages; I read him straight in Russian for class (20th Century Russian Lit, or some such seminar?)

[Heteronym]

Well, with all respect to the majority, I disagree. At the time I was young and found the uninterrupted narrative fascinating, as if the author didn't want to give the reader a break from that neverending day he was describing. But looking back, I see nothing remarkable about the novel other than the eye-opening content. It's not a novel that had me captivated because of its prose, which was of a dry, reportorial tone.

[hdw]

Solzhenitsyn's last 9 short stories are at last to appear in English.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011...-short-stories

How's this for monoglot-English insularity -

"Although the stories were published in a prominent literary journal, Novy Mir, and one appeared in English in a 2006 collection of his writings, the other eight were overlooked until now by English-language publishers. Jeremy Beer, representing the Solzhenitsyn estate, said: "No one knew these stories really existed because they'd only been published in Russian."

Only in Russian! It's not as if they were in Chuvash or Tadjik or Letzeburgisch. God help us. They would probably have had a better chance of attracting attention in the West if they had circulated as samizdat in Soviet times.

Typically, nowhere in this longish article does it mention who the translator of these stories is. Nor does the Canongate website have any information about them.

Harry