Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2000) (131p) [Inua].pdf

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (MCV) (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Library Binding – January, 2001
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Library Binding: 200 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications (January 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791059189
ISBN-13: 978-0791059180

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

Editor's Note:
My Introduction wonders whether Solzehenitsyn's importance may prove to be more historical than aesthetic, and questions also whether he has been able to transcend Tolstoy's influence upon him.
The chronological sequence of criticism begins with Edmund E. Ericson Jr.'s consideration of the short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is seen as a tribute to humanity's endurance.
In a very challenging essay, James M. Curtis analyzes Solzhenitsyn's complex relation to his great precursor, Tolstoy, after which Kenneth N. Brostrom finds in the poem Prussian Nights Solzhenitsyn's insistence that morality resides in our actions, and not in our feelings.
The Gulag Archipelago is regarded by John B. Dunlop as a "positive" statement, despite the horrors it depicts, because it represents a triumph over ideology.
Edward J. Brown examines Solzhenitsyn's polemical literary satire The Calf and the Oak, finding in it a crucial document of Russian cultural history, while Mikhail S. Bernstam sees Solzhenitsyn as an original Liberal without precedent in Russian tradition, and therefore doomed to be misunderstood both in Russia and the West.
Q. D. Leavis defends Solzhenitsyn both as a literary stylist, and as an advocate of individual rights, after which Anna Diegel compares Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn as such advocates.
Dostoevsky is contrasted to Solzhenitsyn, as novelistic visonaries of detention by the state, in Sophie Ollivier's essay, while Caryl Emerson views Solzhenitsyn as a prophet whose Word warns us against the "relentless cult of novelty."