Video of Harvard Address now available with English subtitles

Ever since we uploaded, in 2013, the complete video of Solzhenitsyn’s seminal Harvard Address, it has generated over 170,000 views, hundreds of positive comments, and a few negative ones. But also—a persistent clamor amongst viewers for a solution to the dual Russian/English audio that makes it difficult to make out individually the Russian-speaking voice of Solzhenitsyn and the English-speaking voice of his translator, Irina Alberti. While isolating these audio streams is a task beyond our technical means, we are delighted to offer readers/viewers, as a New Year’s gift, an excellent alternative: carefully arranged subtitles that allow English speakers to follow the address much more easily. We are immensely grateful to Mr James Hooghkirk, who generously volunteered his time and expertise to bring this improvement to fruition. Happy watching!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University-8 June 1978. {Russian audio with English-translation audio overlay; and English subtitles.} Full Russian text here: http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/solzh/1121759601.html Full English text here: www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart

Just published: No. 7 of "Studying Solzhenitsyn"

The 7th issue of Studying Solzhenitsyn is out.

Studying Solzhenitsyn, No. 7 (2019)   360 pp.
This issue presents, for the first time, Solzhenitsyn’s recollections of his school years; archival documents pertaining to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn 50 years ago; the author’s correspondence with Heinrich Böll (1968–82); photographic materials relating to Solzhenitsyn’s military career; and the reflections of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the author’s son, on Aleksandr Chaikovsky’s opera “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. Sections detailing current goings-on in the Solzhenitsyn space include information on the latest editions of Solzhenitsyn’s works, on new scholarly studies or conferences focused on Solzhenitsyn, on special exhibits or permanent museum installations bearing on the writer, on new or imminent theatrical, cinematic, or musical interpretations of his works, and on the latest (2017 and 2018) awards of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Prize in Literature. The issue is rounded out by reproductions of handwritten manuscripts and by photographs.

Contents & Summary (English) 

Law & Liberty review of March 1917, Book 2

Over at Law & Liberty, Will Morrisey reviews March 1917, Book 2.

“Although in one sense a historical novel—most of the characters are real people, and Solzhenitsyn deploys them not as mere cameos but as men and women in full—of all his novels so far, this one feels the most immediate, the most current. The freneticism, violence, confusion, and disorientation of Russians in Petrograd from March 13 through March 15 of 1917 can also be seen in minds and actions of Chinese in Hong Kong, right now. No one knows exactly what to do, although many suppose they do. And even if we didn’t know how the revolution did end, we can see it won’t end well. No one surpasses Solzhenitsyn in conveying a sense of what it feels to live at and near the center of this kind of vortex.”

— Will Morrisey

New Richard Tempest book on Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn scholar Richard Tempest has just published Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), a welcome new study examining 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.

Mr. Tempest’s book is available directly from the publisher, in hardcover or e-book from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

Table 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

Mahoney speaks about The Red Wheel in Washington, DC

Russian Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is the author of two great “literary cathedrals,” The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, the latter of which is an account of Russia’s path to revolution and totalitarianism in the years culminating in 1917. In the third volume of The Red Wheel, entitled March 1917, the story arrives at “the revolution at last.” At the Kennan Institute a few days ago, Professor Daniel Mahoney discussed March 1917 in relation to The Red Wheel as a whole – that is August 1914, October 1916, the four books of March 1917, and the two books of April 1917. The just published English-language version of March 1917, Book 2, a work of both literature and dramatic history, chronicles the fateful days of March 13-15, which led to the collapse of the autocracy and the origins of the Russian Revolution.

Listen above.

New Russian edition of Two Hundred Years Together

Moscow publisher Prozaik has issued, in two volumes, a new Russian edition of Two Hundred Years Together, illustrated with paintings and photographs relating to the entire period (roughly 1772-1972) covered by the book. The text is the canonical final authorized text, as published in vols. 26 & 27 of Solzhenitsyn’s Collected Works in 2015.

English readers are reminded that an authorized translation of the full work is firmly in the plans, but awaits the completion of English publication of The Red Wheel. Therefore, no information is yet available regarding a specific publication timeline. 

Meanwhile, readers need to be forewarned that any and all English versions available on the Internet are illegal, pirated, and/or entirely unauthorized; often poorly and loosely translated; and redact passages, and indeed whole chapters, that apparently do not support the prejudices of those behind these illegal editions.

On Solzhenitsyn's 101st birthday: never-published-before autobiography

Today, on 11 December 2019, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 101st birthday, Rossiskaya Gazeta [Russian-language] publishes an excerpt from Chapter 2, “School”, of Solzhenitsyn’s never-published-before autobiography. Chapter 1 appeared last year in Studying Solzhenitsyn, vol. 6, while this Chapter 2 will appear in full in the forthcoming vol. 7.

Solzhenitsyn books on Christmas list

Between Two Millstones, Book 1, and March 1917, Book 2 have both made the Christmas list over at VoegelinView.

“Magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present. The main character is Petrograd itself.”

— Nathan Harter, recommending March 1917, Book 2

Warning to the West re-issued today

Warning to the West, a collection of famous speeches given by Solzhenitsyn in the USA and UK in 1975 and 1976, has just been re-issued by our friends at Vintage/Penguin, with a new introduction by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. UK/Commonwealth readers can buy paperback or e-book from Penguin or wherever books are sold. For USA readers, paperback is most easily obtained from Amazon.

“While my father’s direst predictions failed to come to pass, is it not in part because the very urgency of his clarion call for the West to stand and fight (or at least not to aid Communist oppression – ‘when they bury us in the ground alive, please do not send them shovels’, he wryly remarks) laid the groundwork for the coming rise of leaders such as John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, whose moral clarity about Communist savagery tipped the scales at last toward the cause of freedom? Surely, solzhenitsyn’s exhortation for a moral component in politics, for a repudiation of all violence (not only of war), and for a balance of the spiritual and material, gives us much yet to ponder – even in a world dramatically transformed by the courage he enjoined and exemplified.”

— Ignat Solzhenitsyn