Читать книгу Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? - Elisa Kriza - Страница 11

There is no doubt, though, that his witness as a writer has already earned itself an enduring place in the Russian literature of this century.[23]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was educated as a mathematician and worked initially as a teacher. He wrote books in his free time and his first break into publishing was in late 1962. Himself a former inmate, Solzhenitsyn’s first printed work was a story about everyday life in a Soviet prison camp. It was published in the most prestigious Soviet literary journal and hit the shelves just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Solzhenitsyn’s literary debut made him world famous and turned this and later works into international best-sellers.

Solzhenitsyn’s reception as a writer begins with his prison-camp literature. In this chapter I will take the topic of the prison camp experience as the foundation for my analysis of a part of his reception in the US, UK, and West Germany. I begin the chapter by introducing Solzhenitsyn’s three main camp-related works and analyzing their style and genre. This will provide the necessary basis for understanding how the reception relates to these works and how it is linked to debates concerning witness literature and camp literature. The theme of certain works by Solzhenitsyn implies that they can belong to these forms of literature, and I will discuss what theoretical advantages and challenges this categorization brings. What role does Solzhenitsyn’s witness status play in the reception of his camp-related texts? What kind of expectations did his readers have, and what did they see in these works?