NP: Solzhenitsyn

[Mark Kohut]

Solzhenitsyn (thru SOME Pynchon framing, since I needed a foothold AND I can't help it):

Much of the early Solzhenitsyn, which got him his Nobel, reads in English
like good, dense, best of 19th Century realism....in that dichotomy, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, more Tolstoy...(say, without brightness. [But of course he has some brightness, some goodness in his Hell.] As TRP does in AtD)
George Eliot-like or Hardy maybe?, with his dour pessimism to use loose comparisons. 

AS seems to need a big ORG or institution as metaphor in his most famous work. A "Cancer Ward", "First Circle" of Hell as Russia, the Russian Army in the books Rich mentions (I did not read those). Perhaps, you've lead me to think, the ORGS embody how he sees Russia: one sick institution.

In "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch",a short novel, the prison camp is the institution. It feels like a documentary, a diary, 'true' as intended.
(an unfeverish, unmetaphysical "House of the Dead")?. 

A long short story called "Matryona's House" came to my mind as we read the Cyprian sections in AtD. 

One way---but so different, so literal---AS is a bit like OBA in that AS found in History, he showed, where the Russia he loved went BAD....one of his tensions is that he, as could most, felt that 19th Century Russia was so unjust that it had to change, there had to be some kind of "revolution".
But not what happened. (He literally put the blame on one real man and his
supporters but I can not remember who. I used to know, but....Clue: Before Lenin.)

I understand that an unabridged----1400+ pages; War & Peace-size----First Circle, newly translated, is coming out this fall (or next Spring) 

Best,
Mark





--- On Mon, 8/4/08, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> From: kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com>
> Subject: NP: Solzhenitsyn
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, August 4, 2008, 9:04 PM
> I've never read any of his books.  For those who have,
> how would you rate his strictly literary merits (if it's
> possible to separate them from his political merits)?
> 
> Laura