Apricot Jam
And Other Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking stories— interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as "binary"—join Solzhenitsyn's already available work as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century.
With Soviet and post–Soviet life as their focus, they weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In "The Upcoming Generation," a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In "Nastenka," two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives—until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both.
The most eloquent and acclaimed opponent of government oppression, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and his work continues to receive international acclaim. Available for the first time in English, Apricot Jam: And Other Stories is a striking example of Solzhenitsyn's singular style and only further solidifies his place as a true literary giant/
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this uneven but fascinating collection of eight stories written after the late Nobel Prize winning author's 1994 return to Russia, seven are structured "binarily," describing Russians from all walks of life both before and after the Soviet upheavals of war, revolution, and reform. This conceit includes enough variation to avoid becoming too schematic, though several of the longer war narratives will mesmerize or fatigue, depending on the reader's willingness to accept form as content their lumbering progress and myopic point of view closely mirrors a grunt's progress from trench to trench. In "Adlig Schwenkitten: A Tale of Twenty-Four Hours" the commander of a sound-ranging unit charged with locating enemy troops (as Solzhenitsyn himself was) is as frustrated by his inability to find Nazis as he is dismayed by the whereabouts of the Soviet battalions for whom he is scouting. More crisply told is the title story, in which a prisoner sends a desperate letter to a famous writer, pleading for food and recalling an apricot tree from his peasant childhood; upon receiving the letter, the writer envies the prisoner's naive writing style. After surviving imprisonment, censor, and deportation, Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) more than earns his moments of irony, though a sense of resignation permeates these pages.
