The Solzhenitsyn reader new and essential writings 1947-2005

Synopsis

             The Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the truly monumental figures of our time. His unyielding and courageous dissidence in the face of the twentieth century’s most powerful totalitarian regime landed him in the Soviet gulag and eventually led to his exile to the West in 1974, where he was given a hero’s welcome. But because Solzhenitsyn’s witness to the truth did not spare the liberal democracies, he has been increasingly demonized in the last three decades, his moral insight and prophecy often sneered at or ignored. The texts assembled in this volume abundantly testify to the multiple ways that Solzhenitsyn’s writings have from the beginning illumined the age of ideology and spoken with depth and eloquence to the enduring human condition.            This reader, compiled by renowned Solzhenitsyn scholars Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney in collaboration with the Solzhenitsyn family, provides in one volume a rich and representative selection of Solzhenitsyn’s voluminous works. Reproduced in their entirety are early poems, early and late short stories, early and late “miniatures” (or prose poems), and many of Solzhenitsyn’s famous—and not-so-famous—essays and speeches. The volume also includes excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s great novels, memoirs, books of political analysis and historical scholarship, and the literary and historical masterpieces The Gulag Archipelagoand The Red Wheel.More than one-quarter of the material has never before appeared in English (the author’s sons prepared many of the new translations themselves).            The Solzhenitsyn Readerreveals a writer of genius, an intransigent opponent of ideological tyranny and moral relativism, and a thinker and moral witness who is acutely sensitive to the great drama of good and evil that takes place within every human soul. It will be for many years the definitive Solzhenitsyn collection.