The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn

by Edward E. Ericson Jr., Alexis Klimoff

Overview

Authored by two eminent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn scholars, The Soul and Barbed Wire is the first and only book to offer both a detailed biography and a comprehensive appraisal of the literary achievement of the Nobel prize–winning author who became one of the Soviet regime's most formidable foes.

The book begins with a detailed biographical survey that traces Solzhenitsyn's evolution from an ardent Communist and loyal Soviet front-line officer into a devastating critic of all ideological distortions of authentic human values and a historian of the many-faceted events that led to, and the tragedy set loose by, the Russian Revolution. This biographical section goes on to portray the writer's strenuous efforts to convey this message to the West during his years of exile, and to his countrymen after his return to Russia.

The bulk of the book, however, consists of sharply focused essays on a large number of Solzhenitsyn's writings. Ericson and Klimoff comment on virtually all his works of fiction as well as on a generous selection of texts belonging to historical or journalistic genres. Because the volume assumes no prior knowledge of its subject, it will prove particularly helpful to those who are coming to Solzhenitsyn for the first time, while its well-nigh encyclopedic inclusiveness should appeal even to the most seasoned readers.

Drawing upon the best available Solzhenitsyn scholarship, the authors strive to present a balanced and accurate appraisal of the remarkable life and hugely influential works that have often been misunderstood and not infrequently been misrepresented.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933859583
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	07/15/2008
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (1939–2017) was Professor of English at Calvin College, where he taught for twenty-six years. He was the author of two books on Solzhenitsyn, editor of the one-volume authorized abridgment of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005.

Alexis Klimoff is Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Vassar College. His publications on Solzhenitsyn include the coeditorship of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, the editorship of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion, translations of various essays and addresses by Solzhenitsyn, and reviews of translations of his works into English.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
Life

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a mere ten years of age, he launched the literary career that he was to pursue for the rest of his life. It was at this time that the precocious lad established a handwritten journal extravagantly titled The Twentieth Century, with the equally vaulting phrase "On the Meaning of the Twentieth Century" as the subtitle. The earliest actual products of his juvenile pen, however-illustrations and jokes intermingled with verse, science fiction, and a serialized story about pirates-fell well short of fulfilling the grand design suggested by these titles. More than four decades later, the author himself summed up the beginnings of his career thus: "From childhood on I experienced an entirely unprompted inclination toward writing and produced a great deal of the usual adolescent nonsense." But it was not very long before his choice of subject matter started to catch up with the high ambition that framed his boyish exercises. As his eighteenth birthday approached, Solzhenitsyn, by then an ardent convert to Marxism, set himself the goal of describing afresh the Russian Revolution and its glorious meaning for the world. His innate creative drive had become focused and channeled into a sense of mission. Before another decade had passed, however, Solzhenitsyn came to reject utterly the utopian dreams that had so captivated him in his youth, since the Soviet experiment had by then revealed itself as a murderous sham that was evil in its very design. Yet despite this radical turnaround in his views, he continued to look upon the Russian Revolution as the key turning point in modern history, one that cried out for the intense study conceived in his adolescence. So immense did this project prove to be that it absorbed a large proportion of the writer's time even after he had reached the pinnacle of worldwide fame. When he was finished, in 1991, this epic cycle bore the title The Red Wheel and ran to more than six thousand pages.

It was life itself that had led to the sea change in Solzhenitsyn's outlook. His experience of arrest, prison, and labor camp had exposed the harsh truth behind the faade of Soviet life and had driven the aspiring author to turn his new knowledge into literary form. Addressing these contemporary realities distracted him from executing his chef d'oeuvre, but he followed the dictates of what he understood to be his duty to his fellow prisoners. The works of fiction that emerged as a result became the most compelling depictions of this information that readers the world over had ever been granted. Nadezhda Mandelstam has written that no work she has read compares to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in its ability to convey the brutal reality of the camps.

Of all the fascinating life stories produced by the turbulent twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn's was surely one of the most sensational. In Soviet terms, such a life should never have happened. By sheer independence of mind, Solzhenitsyn had wandered off the officially sanctioned trail and gone his own way, thinking his own thoughts. What is more, he had turned into a sworn foe of the Soviet state and engaged it in direct conflict in a series of confrontations, each of which has a highly dramatic plot. Indeed, there is a sense in which Solzhenitsyn's life resembles a work of art. Because autobiographical elements provide the foundation of many of his literary products, however, it is better to think of his life and his art as forming a seamless web; neither his life nor his art can be properly understood without reference to the other.

Solzhenitsyn has revealed that in 1985-86 he set down an autobiographical narrative encompassing his life up to the moment of exile; this text remains unpublished, but even without it there is no paucity of autobiographical information. The biographical narrative related in the present chapter comprises three parts: Solzhenitsyn's life in the USSR, his life in exile (both in Switzerland and in the USA), and his life back in post-Soviet Russia. The first part draws as much as possible upon those works which are assumed to be largely autobiographical in character. The overall picture that emerges is one which, in significant ways, happens to parallel the life of the Russian nation. David Remnick has come to the same conclusion, calling Solzhenitsyn "a Russian whose destiny is singular and, at the same time, nearly identical to Russia's."

Russia entered the twentieth century with a thousand-year history rich with religious tradition; it endured a seventy-four-year subordination to an ideologically driven totalitarian regime; and it emerged from that parenthesis of radical dislocation trying to renew its ancient heritage and reinvigorate its society. As a child, Solzhenitsyn was reared in the ways of Russian Orthodoxy; he became a self-professed Communist in his teenage years, but eventually moved on to reclaim his birthright and to search for a better future for himself and for his nation. It is rare for a writer to identify with his nation as closely and as fully as Solzhenitsyn has done. His people's story is what he mainly writes about; it is also his story. His enormous literary corpus could be fairly summarized as an exposition and analysis of the Soviet experiment upon the Russian people. Furthermore, to the extent that totalitarianism, which first waxed and then waned in the twentieth century, gives that century its distinctive character and coloration, the story of Russia during Solzhenitsyn's lifetime is paradigmatic for an entire epoch.