Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds(Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century)

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 2003-07.

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 inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich" 3. "Turgenev Never Knew": TheShorter 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 PartTwo: The Writer Ex Situ 7. Twilight of All the Russias: The Red Wheel 8. Return: The ShorterFictions of the 1990s 9: Modernist? Appendix Three Interviews with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2003–7) Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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.

Review :
“[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