Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The First Circle & other works (10 books)seeders: 88
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The First Circle & other works (10 books) (Size: 79.54 MB)
Description ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN (1918-2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism who was instrumental in raising global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin's regime, he served eight years in Russian prisons and labor camps. Upon his release in 1953 he was sent into "internal exile" in Asiatic Russia. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was released from his exile and began writing in earnest. It was during these years of imprisonment and later internal exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. His first publication, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (1962), was published in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir during the somewhat less repressive atmosphere of Khrushchev's regime. The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single, gruelling day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Its publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history since never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed. The translation included here by H. T. Willetts is the only one based on the canonical Russian text and the only one authorized by Solzhenitsyn. Soviet officials soon clamped down on Solzhenitsyn and other Russian artists, and henceforth his works had to be secreted out of Russia in order to be published. These works included the semi-autobiographical novel CANCER WARD (1968); THE FIRST CIRCLE (1968), originally published in a self-censored or "distorted" version (an English translation of the full version was eventually published in 2009); and AUGUST 1914 (1971), an unusual blend of fiction narrative and historiography about Imperial Russia's defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia. The massive three-volume, seven-part GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (1973-1978) has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience, the testimony of 256 former prisoners ("zeks"), and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. According to fellow gulag historian Anne Applebaum, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO’S rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology, made it one of the most consequential books of the 20th century. The following books are a mix of PDF and/or ePUB formats: * APRICOT JAM & OTHER STORIES (Counterpoint, 2011). Translated by Kenneth Lantz and Stephan Solzhenitsyn. -- ePUB * AUGUST 1914: The Red Wheel, Knot I (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989). Translated by Harry T. Willetts. -- PDF * CANCER WARD (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969). Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. -- ePUB * THE FIRST CIRCLE (Collins, 1968). Translated by Michael Guybon. -- ePUB * THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Harper & Row, 1974-78). 3 volumes. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney (Vols. 1-2) and Harry T. Willetts (Vol. 3). -- PDF + ePUB * THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Abridged Edition (Harvill, 1986). Translated by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry T. Willetts; abridged by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. -- ePUB * IN THE FIRST CIRCLE: The Restored Text (HarperPerennial, 2009). Translated by Harry T. Willetts. -- ePUB * ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). Translated by Harry T. Willetts, with an Introduction by Katherine Shonk. -- ePUB Sharing WidgetAll Comments |
THE RED WHEEL is an ambitious cycle of novels published in four parts (or "knots") -- consuming more than 6,000 pages! -- that detail the fall of Imperial Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn considered it his greatest work. According to Michael Scammell, following the publication of AUGUST 1914, "the original plan had called for up to 20 novels, but the sheer length of the next two novels in the series, [November] 1916 and March 1917 (each consisting of two volumes, published in 1985 and 1998), showed that this would be physically impossible. Solzhenitsyn therefore concluded the cycle with April 1917 (1991), possibly influenced by the fact that the historical novels were being met with neither critical nor popular success. The consensus held them to be too densely packed with historical data and turgid commentary, and too short on artistic invention to be of great interest to readers."
Only the first two knots have thus far appeared in English translation:
* AUGUST 1914 (Knot I) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989). Translated by H. T. Willetts and included in the present collection.
* NOVEMBER 1916 (Knot II) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Translated by H. T. Willetts. I have been unable to locate a digital copy of this translation but continue to look for it.
* MARCH 1917 (Knot III). Available in Russian and French translation; not yet translated into English.
* APRIL 1917 (Knot IV). Available only in Russian; not yet translated into English.
In 2010, Edward Ericson, who edited the one volume abridgement of The Gulag Archipelago, was pessimistic that the full cycle of novels would ever appear in English. "That would take a rich benefactor," he said. "It’s never going to make a profit. I don’t even think the sales would pay the cost of the translation."
On the other hand, in late 2013, Joseph Pearce, another Solzhenitsyn scholar who has worked with the author's sons in promoting an English-language edition of THE RED WHEEL in its entirety, stated: "If all goes well this should see the light of day by 2018, the centenary of the great man's birth."