Essays on Russian Literature

An anthology of Solzhenitsyn’s literary criticism, reflecting his own, idiosyncratic, defamiliarizing take on familiar works, genres, and styles.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was perhaps the foremost moral witness to Soviet totalitarianism, and the last great representative of the 19th-century Russian ethical tradition. This volume is an anthology of Solzhenitsyn’s literary criticism, engaging with the Russian canon across decades and centuries, from Lermontov and Chekhov to Akhmatova and Brodsky. The creator of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago proves here that he could discern the presence of kindness or beauty in a work by an artist whose artistic practices are by and large alien to his own; or even, in his view, objectionable. Insightful, aphoristic, and occasionally provocative, these essays explore dozens of imagined worlds, crafted by some of Russia’s greatest writers and poets—and Solzhenitsyn's inimitable way of expressing himself, with lively, witty, sometimes waspish turns of phrase, is very much at the fore.