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

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.

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

March 1917, Book 2 published today

The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 2 is available today for the first time in English from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

With this volume we arrive at “the revolution at last" with an utterly passive and inconsequential Tsar, feckless liberals and socialists in the new Provisional Government (who see no enemies to the Left), disciplined totalitarian socialists with their eyes on the prize, and revolutionary mobs, drunk with the spirit of revolution and destruction. “The Red Wheel” is beginning to arrive at its destination… And there is some superb writing on Solzhenitsyn's part: expertly drawn streets scenes or fragments that capture the collective nihilism of the revolutionary crowds, and a remarkable chapter on the abdication of Tsar Nikolai—not to mention the devastating portrait of the vain Kerensky, and many others. The book covers three dramatic and consequential days, March 13-15, 1917.

We remind Solzhenitsyn readers of the overall sequence of the 10-volume Red Wheel:
Node I: August 1914, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node II: November 1916, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node III: March 1917, Book 1 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 2 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 3 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 4 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 1 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 2 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)

To inform readers about Solzhenitsyn’s system of “Nodes”, and also to explain the definitive term “Node” (instead of the older “Knot”), here is a portion of the Publisher’s Note that accompanies each of the Notre Dame volumes:

The English translations by H.T. Willetts of August 1914 and November 1916, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989 and 1999, respectively, appeared as Knot I and Knot II. The present translation, in accordance with the wishes of the Solzhenitsyn estate, has chosen the term “Node” as more faithful to the author’s intent. Both terms refer, as in mathematics, to discrete points on a continuous line. In a 1983 interview with Bernard Pivot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described his narrative concept as follows: “The Red Wheel is the narrative of revolution in Russia, its movement through the whirlwind of revolution. This is an immense scope of material, and . . . it would be impossible to describe this many events and this many characters over such a lengthy stretch of time. That is why I have chosen the method of nodal points, or Nodes. I select short segments of time, of two or three weeks’ duration, where the most vivid events unfold, or else where the decisive causes of future events are formed. And I describe in detail only these short segments. These are the Nodes. Through these nodal points I convey the general vector, the overall shape of this complex curve.”

Short Video Introducing March 1917, Book 2

Learn more about the forthcoming English publication of March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2, due out for the first time in English, translated by Marian Schwartz, 15 November from University of Notre Dame Press.

March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Available November 15, 2019, wherever books are sold. Published by University of Notre Dame Press at undpress.nd.edu

New audiobook of abridged Gulag Archipelago, read by author's son

cover of new audiobook

Our friends at Vintage/Penguin have issued a brand-new audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago (abridged version), read by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. For the time being, it is only available in the UK/Commonwealth countries, but is scheduled to come to the US in 2020. (If you prefer paperback, go here. For the full 3-volume set, go here.) Here is an excerpt from Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s reading—from Part 1, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”.

“Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. No matter how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will not emit electrons. But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to glow, it does emit them. (The threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.) You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.

Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, without, perhaps, the possibility of return .”

— from The Gulag Archipelago, Part I, Chapter 4, "The Bluecaps"

Brand-new translation: Solzhenitsyn's "Golden Matrix" speech

National Review website has just published a brand-new translation of Solzhenitsyn's "Golden Matrix" speech, delivered in Zurich on 31 May 1974 in accepting the Italian journalists’ “Golden Matrix” prize. This thoughtful speech, prefiguring many of the key themes of the Harvard Address, has never before appeared in English. Happy reading! (Bonus: see short clip below of the prize ceremony from that day.)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn receives the “Cliché d’Oro” (“Golden Matrix”) prize on 31 May 1974 in Zurich.

"Russia. The West. Ukraine" out in Russian

CoLibri Books have just published a new collection of Solzhenitsyn’s thoughts, entitled “Россия. Запад. Украина” (“Russia. The West. Ukraine”), compiled by Natalia Solzhenitsyn. This is a beautifully presented slim 5x7 hardback of 176 pages. It opens with a 4-page introduction from the compiler, followed by a 110-page section entitled “Россия и Запад” (“Russia and the West”). This section, presented in chronological order, is comprised of 21 selections excerpted from Solzhenitsyn’s speeches, press-conferences, interviews, and essays, beginning with the Walter Cronkite/CBS interview of June 1974, and ending with the Der Spiegel interview of July 2007. There follows a 39-page second section entitled “Об Украине” (“About Ukraine”), comprised of 11 selections, again presented chronologically, from the prophetic part V, chapter 2 of the Gulag Archipelago (written in 1967), to the author’s Izvestiya article from March 2008, just months before his death. The book is rounded off by a 9-page “Краткие пояснения” (“Brief explanatory notes”) that place each selection in context and provide precise bibliographical information about earlier publications across various languages.

“This book, timed for the centenary of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, collects his thoughts about the true meaning of Freedom, about Russia and the West’s false conceptions of each other, and about new dangers that threaten modern civilzation.
A separate section is devoted to a Slavic tragedy—the writer’s “perpetual sorrow and pain”—to Ukraine, about relations with whom he had written already a half-century ago, and until his very last days.”

— from the publisher

JUST PUBLISHED: NO. 6 OF "STUDYING SOLZHENITSYN"

The 6th issue of Studying Solzhenitsyn is out, after a (planned) two-year hiatus.

Studying Solzhenitsyn, No. 6 (2018)   408 pp. This issue presents, for the first time, Solzhenitsyn’s recollections of his childhood years and his “long-lost miniature”; selections from the author’s correspondence with Gregory (Afonsky), OCA Bishop of Alaska (1975–79); archival documents illuminating Solzhenitsyn’s military career; and documents pertaining to the author’s 50th-birthday celebrations in 1968. 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) 
Buy in hardcover (Russian)

New bilingual edition of Miniatures from YMCA-Press

Yesterday YMCA-Press, Solzhenitsyn’s long-time publishing house in Paris, released a beautiful new bilingual (Russian and French) complete edition of his Miniatures, containing both the 18 miniatures of 1958–63, and the 14 miniatures of 1996–99. There is a new afterword by renowned Solzhenitsyn scholar Georges Nivat, as well as some useful notes about each miniature. For convenient juxtaposition, and as traditional with bilingual editions, the original Russian text appears verso, and the French translation recto. The translation is the same expert one, by Lucile Nivat and Nikia Struve, that first appeared in 2004 from Fayard.

Two new Solzhenitsyn titles published in French today

The Paris house Fayard, Solzhenitsyn’s longtime French publisher, has published two new Solzhenitsyn titles: the Journal de la Roue rouge (Journal of the Red Wheel) and Révolution et mensonge (Revolution and the Lie). The first is a new translation by Françoise Lesourd of a major work that tracks the author’s discoveries and doubts during the major portion of his work on the novel (from 1965 through 1991). The second combines two previously available texts—Vivre sans mentir (Live Not By Lies!) and Leçons de Février (Lessons of February)—with a new Georges Nivat translation: Deux révolutions: la française at la russe (Two Revolutions: the French and the Russian) of Solzhenitsyn’s 1984 article comparing and contrasting those two cataclysms.

Short Video Introducing Between Two Millstones

Learn more about the forthcoming English publication of BETWEEN TWO MILLSTONES, Book 1: Sketches of Exile.