Description
Book SynopsisRichard 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.
Trade ReviewRichard Tempest's
Overwriting Chaos is a systematic up-to-date study of the structures of Solzhenitsyn's artistic imagination. It places Solzhenitsyn in three widening frames: as a writer dealing with the Gulag and its pre-history, as an integral part of the Russian literary tradition, and, importantly and innovatively, as a major presence in world literature. It combines intratextual insight with discussions of intertextuality, connections with real-life phenomena, and effect on audiences. … The language of the book is rich, vivid, accessible, and methodologically and multilingually precise. … The book should be taken into account in all further research on Solzhenitsyn's fiction, as a theory of Solzhenitsyn's poetics, a source of local insights, a pilot, or a springboard."—Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Russian ReviewTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Translations andTransliterations
- Preface
- Timeline of Solzhenitsyn's Life and Works
-
- 1. The Quilted Jerkin: Solzhenitsyn's Life and Art
- 2. Ice, Squared: "One Day inthe 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
- PartTwo: 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
