Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Heteronym]

Only published in Russian?

But how else should they have been published? What, the Russian author, writing in Russian, publishing in his country, should have made instantaneous translations for the English market or something? Isn't it the competence of publishers abroad to scout the foreign markets for new material to translate and publish?

[Eric]

I think that the brand name "Solzhenitsyn" may have gradually lost popularity once the very old Solzhenitsyn moved on from being the conscience of the nation to just being another old Russian chauvinist. This is a bit like how the analysist Lev Tolstoy became a kind of Christian fundamentalist, if I dare use the term, in his old age.

So maybe the appetite wasn't there at the time to get the stories out in English. During the Cold War, there were plenty of funds in the West ready to publish Russian things to spite the Communist régime in Russia, rightly so, given the GULags and other undemocratic things. But Russia under Putin (and Medvedev) is a less tangible threat to the West, and people haven't yet got to grips with what present-day Russia is all about. And contemporary Russian literature is as good as ignored by the great and the good in Western publishing.

[liehtzu]

Just recently re-read Sozhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard address, which provoked a great deal of fury back in its day - most of it of a particularly knee-jerk kind. I don't agree with all of it either - who wants to agree with everything all the time? - but there's much here that sets me a-ponderin'.

Much of the criticism came from corners crying out. "We gave him refuge! He has no right to criticize us!" Which begs the question: Does being a guest in another country mean one can't publicly criticize it? Solzhenitsyn is hardly championing the Soviet Union, but he sees a lot in the US that he dislikes. A failure of nerve? Cowardice? Spiritual mediocrity? Wot?

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine...rvard1978.html

and a number of responses, both immediately after and later:

http://www.starlancs.com/EducateMe/S...%20Harvard.pdf

[Liam]

A new translation of S's last short stories is coming out in September:

"With Soviet and post-Soviety life as their focus, these stories weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In The Upcoming Generation, a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In Nastenka, two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives--until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both."

[altai]

Solzhenitsyn was an important historiographer of Russian XXth history history. His life virtually coincided with the XXth century. When one reads his biography it's amazing what the man had to go through in his life. He was born just after the revolution, as a young man he went to the front and survived the Great Patriotic War from the beginning almost till the end when he was arrested and put to the camp for his critical stance on Stalin and the Soviet regime. He survived several years in different prisons and camps and was exiled to Khazakhstan, where he fought and survived the cancer. In the 90s when he returned to Russia from the US emigration, he became a sort of Tolstoy like figure, a 'sage old man' giving semi improvised lectures on TV about modern politics. I recall watching him as a teenager and I remember he was a bit naive in his advice and you could see he didn't understand the current political and economic situation in Russia.

I tried to read his "The First Cycle" but gave up shortly after a few dozen torturous pages. I recall being incredibly irritated by his strange language. It's like he invented his own Russian with weird awkward phrase twists and conned words. I watched later a documentary about him where the writer defends his style by saying that he actually resurrected the real Russian language. He said in the camp he had read the Russian dictionary from A to Z (or from A to Я in the Russian case) to digest the richness of the Russian language. He also said he kept diaries of quotations from people he met during his life, trying to preserve regional dialects and phraseology. I guess the goal of his work was to document the life of his generation in the Soviet Union, the reality surrounding him the real history of people which was erased and silenced by the official propaganda.

There is a good documentary on Sozhenitsyn by Sokurov, made as a seires of conversations with the writer, where he talks about his life, Russian history, Russian literature. It has some interesting insights into many aspects of Russian literary and political history of XIXth and XXth centuries. It's on the youtube (in Russian) here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVIE37jMt6o