Stories and Prose Poems
New York: Farrar , Straus and Giroux, 1971. First American printing [stated]. Hardcover. [8], 267, [5] pages. DJ has some wear and soiling. A few pencil marks and erasures noted. A treasury of 22 novellas, short stories and prose poems by the Russian Nobel Prize winner includes the tales, "Matryona's House" and "An Incident at Krechetovka Station." Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the U. S. In 1990 his citizenship was restored. Later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature" Solzhenitsyn writes in the great Russian tradition of celebrating the calamity of being born a Russian. No literature seems to have more harrowing things to say about its country, yet none turns towards its earth, its history, its people with such compassion or pride. What has happened to him as a prisoner of the state, and as an individual Russian, he makes known, whether as graphic confession or as symbolic melodrama. In these tales and novellas and prose poems his heroes are everyday martyrs who speak of renewal. They ask what a man must do to be saved; they honor human endurance or mourn the loss. It is a subject peculiarly poignant to the Soviet scene where the private life is programmatically uncultivated and the sprawling public replacement seems so often bare, mean, and corrupt. "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" captures the terrors of the war years in the fleeting friendship of a persecuted actor and a young officer forced to give him away. "Matryona's House" depicts the humble life-enriching character of a peasant woman and her disaffiliated intellectual lodger; it has a wondrous melancholy suffused with a festive strain. Irony, of course, is everywhere, but Solzhenitsyn does not have the nervy gloom of his compatriot Amalrik who pictures a future of utter chaos and cultural despair. His new collection, with its stoical, plain, inward beauty, movingly reminds us that Solzhenitsyn seems never to have written a line that was not somehow tinged with hope. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Russian Literature, Easter, Matryona's House, Krechetovka Station, Freedom, Lake Segden, Duckling, Yesenin, Kolkhoz, Rucksack
ISBN: 0374270333
[Book #85296]
Price: $50.00