The Solzhenitsyn Reader - 2nd Edition by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Paperback)

About the Book

This reader, compiled by renowned Solzhenitsyn scholars Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney in collaboration with the Solzhenitsyn family, provides in one volume a rich and representative selection of Solzhenitsyn's voluminous works. Reproduced in their entirety are early poems, early and late short stories, early and late "miniatures" (or prose poems), and many of Solzhenitsyn's famous--and not-so-famous--essays and speeches. The volume also includes excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's great novels, memoirs, books of political analysis and historical scholarship, and the literary and historical masterpieces The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. More than one-quarter of the material has never before appeared in English (the author's sons prepared many of the new translations themselves).

The Solzhenitsyn Reader reveals a writer of genius, an intransigent opponent of ideological tyranny and moral relativism, and a thinker and moral witness who is acutely sensitive to the great drama of good and evil that takes place within every human soul. It will be for many years the definitive Solzhenitsyn collection.

Book Synopsis

This reader, compiled by renowned Solzhenitsyn scholars Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney in collaboration with the Solzhenitsyn family, provides in one volume a rich and representative selection of Solzhenitsyn's voluminous works. Reproduced in their entirety are early poems, early and late short stories, early and late "miniatures" (or prose poems), and many of Solzhenitsyn's famous--and not-so-famous--essays and speeches.

The volume also includes excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's great novels, memoirs, books of political analysis and historical scholarship, and the literary and historical masterpieces The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. More than one-quarter of the material has never before appeared in English (the author's sons prepared many of the new translations themselves).

The Solzhenitsyn Reader reveals a writer of genius, an intransigent opponent of ideological tyranny and moral relativism, and a thinker and moral witness who is acutely sensitive to the great drama of good and evil that takes place within every human soul. It will be for many years the definitive Solzhenitsyn collection.

Review Quotes

u0022Ericson and Mahoney are to be congratulated in assembling this collection of Solzhenitsyn's corpus. Their introductions to the various offerings provide the reader with an understnading of the focus of the work, its genesis, and outline. I am personally grateful that they included his Harvard Address that illustrates Isaevich as the true Platonic philosopher/prophet, where he fearlessly engages the academy in questions they have no desire to hear let alone answer.u0022
mdash; Robert C. Cheeks, American Thinker

u0022The selections in The Solzhenitsyn Reader confirm what the editors suggest in the opening pages: the author's life almost defies belief. Born in Russia one year after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he outlived the political system that persecuted him, surviving its horrible network of labor camps while documenting its myriad crimes. Solzhenitsyn's writings are indispensable for understanding the 20th century. For those who would like to sample that corpus generously, the Reader is an excellent place to begin.u0022
mdash; David L. Tubbs, Claremont Review of Books

u0022A fine antidote to such simple-minded pigeonholing of Solzhenitsyn--as the brave anti-communist who later went off the deep end--is, as the author suggested, to read his work, particularly his later writings, which are not remotely as one-note as shibboleths about him suggest. A good place to start might be The Solzhenitsyn Reader. [It is] compiled with the cooperation of both Solzhenitsyn and his three sons, it provides a far more textured picture of the writer as an unrelenting artist...a flexible and theologically minded philosopher;...an often daring stylist; and a political and nationalist 'ideologue' only in the eyes of predisposed critics.u0022 -- Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (1939-2017) was Professor of English at Calvin College, where he taught for twenty-six years. He was the author of two books on Solzhenitsyn, editor of the one-volume authorized abridgment of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005.