Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination - Softcover

Curtis, James M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820331864 ISBN 13: 9780820331867

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2008

Synopsis

Most critics overlook the literary significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work, focusing instead on biographical, political, and moral interpretations. This examination of Solzhenitsyn's major novels―One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and August 1914―emphasizes that his writings must be understood within the tradition of Russian literature and the context of Western culture.

James M. Curtis provides a detailed analysis of Tolstoy's crucial influence on Solzhenitsyn, and he discusses at length Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Chekhov, and Zamyatin. Curtis also demonstrates that a study of Ernest Hemingway (whose books have been enormously popular in Russia) and Virginia Woolf can contribute to our understanding of the Russian novelist. Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination includes a chapter on Dos Passos and Eisenstein whose work constituted Solzhenitsyn's first major artistic interest outside Russian literature. The chapter presents the first comprehensive examination of the importance of film for Solzhenitsyn and shows how he learned the use of film technique in literature from Dos Passos and how he adapted it from Eisenstein's films.

This was the first full-length study to use Solzhenitsyn's revised editions of One Day . . ., The First Circle, and Cancer Ward (all published in 1978). Professor Curtis's careful use of the best available texts, together with his wide knowledge of contemporary literary criticism and his insistence upon Solzhenitsyn's purely literary importance, make this a valuable book for all students of Solzhenitsyn's fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

JAMES M. CURTIS is a professor of Russian at the University of Missouri. He is author of Culture as Polyphony and of several articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Review:

Curtis has written successfully about the multiplicity of influences that are interwoven within literary imagination of the enigmatic writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

(South Atlantic Review)

This extraordinary book radically alters the profile of Solzhenitsyn scholarship. . . . The book is continuously fascinating. Curtis has virtuosic control over all his primary and secondary sources. He argues his points masterfully, with neither wasted words nor a trace of arrogance and condescension. He has fitted Solzhenitsyn and the other writers discussed in his book into a critical framework coherent enough to articulate them, yet broad enough to accommodate the particularities of their individual talents.

(Slavic and East European Journal)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0820331864
• ISBN 13: 9780820331867
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224