Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds

by Richard Tempest

Overview

Richard 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644690123
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	12/17/2019
Series:	Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century
Pages:	750
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Tempest is an associate professor at the University of Illinois who studies the interactions between Russian and Western culture. His novel Zolotaya kost, about the adventures of a time-traveling American professor, was published in Moscow in 2004. Tempest’s current research focuses on charismatic politics in the twenty-first century.

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Born from the spirit of terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work has become the emblem of resistance and dignity. Connected to its Soviet origins in every minor detail, this literature is indispensable for our new global turmoil. Combining biography with close reading, Richard Tempest renders Solzhenitsyn’s complexity. From the epigraph from Auden to the concluding citation from Nietzsche, this book situates Solzhenitsyn among the great leaders of modern thought.”

—Alexander Etkind, Professor, European UniversityInstitute, Florence

“In this monumental study of Solzhenitsyn’s art, Richard Tempest subjects the full range of the Russian writer’s literary works to a richly nuanced critical review. Political and biographical aspects provide contexts, but the focus invariably remains fixed on the literary qualities of the texts examined. And here Tempest is in his element: Conversant with the latest critical theories and easily familiar with all the masterworks of Russian and Western literature, he provides startingly fresh, insightful and often brilliant readings of virtually the entire corpus of Solzhenitsyn’s works. A magnificent tour de force!”

—Alexis Klimoff, Professor, Department of Russian Studies, Vassar College

“After hundreds of scholarly volumes written about Solzhenitsyn, Richard Tempest’s book discovers a radically new writer and thinker—‘remarkably sophisticated, subtle, and aware.’ Overwriting Chaos opens a new chapter in Solzhenitsyn studies by moving the entire discipline well beyond the realm of ideological or politicized interpretations. Tempest reads his oeuvre in dialogue with such dissimilar (and sometimes very distant from Solzhenitsyn) writers and thinkers as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Bataille, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and even Vladimir Sorokin. Using this optics, Overwriting Chaos deconstructs the mythology of a martyr-prophet. Instead, Solzhenitysn appears in Tempest’s book as a creator of highly experimental prose, designer of intense intellectual and artistic hybrids between fiction and the document, realism and modernism, authoritative presence and polyphony. Elegantly written, full of astute observations and witty paradoxes, this book reminds us that truly innovative literary criticism belongs both to scholarship and literature, and that an original analysis of a well-known literary text can not only satisfy intellectually but also excite aesthetically.”

—Mark Lipovetsky, Professor, Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

[A] massive and provocative book by the Slavist Richard Tempest has appeared, that aims to come to terms with the entirety of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘fictive worlds.’ With clarity and erudition, Tempest attempts to demonstrate how Solzhenitsyn used numerous experimental and modernist techniques to defend and revivify the realist tradition in literature, a tradition where good and evil are real and utterly palpable, where authentic heroes exist, and where an author committed to truth, responsibility, and the integrity of art manfully resists the chaos and nihilism of the age. Tempest… fully appreciates why Solzhenitsyn rejected ‘the howl of existentialism’ and fashionable but morally and culturally corrosive doctrines about ‘the death of the author.’ Solzhenitsyn refused to fiddle while Rome burned.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney, Perspectives on Political Science

“Richard 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 Review

“Richard Tempest’s book is a wide-ranging study of Solzhenitsyn’s prose texts in the context of the Russian and Western literary traditions. … On the pages of this book Solzhenitsyn emerges not only as a writer (even though he is primarily considered as such), but also as a reader, traveller, paterfamilias, and a victim of (and victor over) the chaos of history. On top of it all, Tempest shares his own phone interviews with Solzhenitsyn (the full texts are attached in an appendix of the book), as well as encounters and conversations with the writer’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, which adds to the lively and comprehensive nature of this scholarly treatise.”

—Anna Arkatova, Hong Kong Baptist University, UIC College, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies

From the Publisher