Bøker av Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

FROM THE PUBLISHER OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO - THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED TRANSLATION OF SOLZHENITSYN'S SEARING DEBUT NOVELThe Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West.

Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter and more personal than those later monumental volumes.

The final book from the Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on the centenary of his birth

This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away-the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other. Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn's remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent emigres who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev's protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too-the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) Note 1 is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia. Historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft described the book as "a fine literary masterpiece, a sharp political indictment against the Soviet regime, and has had tremendous importance in raising the issue of Soviet repression in the Russian consciousness." Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this."Note 3 UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history." Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty's criticism, saying that "he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay ... [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias."In an interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Figes stated that many Gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read: "The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole nation and was the voice of all those who suffered." Soviet dissident and historian Roy Medvedev referred to the book as "extremely contradictory"; in a review for the book, Medvedev described it as without parallel for its impact, saying: "I believe there are few who will get up from their desks after reading this book the same as when they opened its first page. In this regard I have nothing with which to compare Solzhenitsyn's book either in Russian or world literature." (wikipedia.org)

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic work March 1917, Node III, Book 1, of The Red Wheel. The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus about the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes-August 1914 and November 1916-focus on Russia's crises and recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin's reforms, and how the surge of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War I. March 1917-the third node-tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of events. The action of book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 8-12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs. Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition, horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children. Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into question. The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, for each work aims to narrate the story of an era in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same way as Homer's Iliad became the representative account of the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization, these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern world.

Russian Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published.

After his expulsion from Russia in 1974 for undermining the Communist regime, Solzhenitsyn wrote a secret record, while it was still fresh in his mind, of the courageous efforts of people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West.

The subject of Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship has been with us since the breakdown of the Cold War and the termination of the Soviet system, indeed, if not since the origins of Bolshevism

'One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world' Aleksandr SolzhenitsynIn the first month of the First World War the Russian campaign against the Germans creaks into gear.

The subject of Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship has been with us since the breakdown of the Cold War and the termination of the Soviet system, indeed, if not since the origins of Bolshevism

At the height of Stalin's postwar terror, Innokenty, a young diplomat and scion of a corrupt ruling class, discovers an earlier and more spiritual tradition than that adopted by the October Revolution, the beginning of a process which is Solzhenitsyn's basic theme: the individual's experience of acquiring an immortal soul.

FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO'Solzhenitsyn is one of the towering figures of the age, as a writer, as moralist, as hero' Edward CrankshawAfter years in enforced exile on the Kazakhstan steppes, a cancer diagnosis brings Oleg Kostoglotov to Ward 13.