Academic Studies Press Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds (Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century)

Richard Tempest examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s evolution as a literary artist from his early autobiographical novel Love the Revolution to the experimental mega-saga The Red Wheel, and beyond. Tempest shows how this author gives his characters a presence so textured that we can readily imagine them as figures of flesh and blood and thought and feeling. The study discusses Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian Revolution; surprising predilection for textual puzzles and games à la Nabokov or even Borges; exploration of erotic themes; and his polemical interactions with Russian and Western modernism. Also included is new information about the writer’s life and art provided by his family, as well as Tempest’s interviews with him in 2003-7. Review “Richard Tempest’s Overwriting Chaos is a systematic up-to-date study of the structures of Solzhenitsyn’s artistic imagination. It places Solzhenitsyn in three widening frames: as a writer dealing with the Gulag and its pre-history, as an integral part of the Russian literary tradition, and, importantly and innovatively, as a major presence in world literature. It combines intratextual insight with discussions of intertextuality, connections with real-life phenomena, and effect on audiences. … The language of the book is rich, vivid, accessible, and methodologically and multilingually precise. … The book should be taken into account in all further research on Solzhenitsyn’s fiction, as a theory of Solzhenitsyn’s poetics, a source of local insights, a pilot, or a springboard.” ―Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Russian Review “Richard Tempest’s book is a wide-ranging study of Solzhenitsyn’s prose texts in the context of the Russian and Western literary traditions. … On the pages of this book Solzhenitsyn emerges not only as a writer (even though he is primarily considered as such), but also as a reader, traveller, paterfamilias, and a victim of (and victor over) the chaos of history. On top of it all, Tempest shares his own phone interviews with Solzhenitsyn (the full texts are attached in an appendix of the book), as well as encounters and conversations with the writer’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, which adds to the lively and comprehensive nature of this scholarly treatise.” ―Anna Arkatova, Hong Kong Baptist University, UIC College, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies Review “After hundreds of scholarly volumes written about Solzhenitsyn, Richard Tempest’s book discovers a radically new writer and thinker―‘remarkably sophisticated, subtle, and aware.’ Overwriting Chaos opens a new chapter in Solzhenitsyn studies by moving the entire discipline well beyond the realm of ideological or politicized interpretations. Tempest reads his oeuvre in dialogue with such dissimilar (and sometimes very distant from Solzhenitsyn) writers and thinkers as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Bataille, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and even Vladimir Sorokin. Using this optics, Overwriting Chaos deconstructs the mythology of a martyr-prophet. Instead, Solzhenitysn appears in Tempest’s book as a creator of highly experimental prose, designer of intense intellectual and artistic hybrids between fiction and the document, realism and modernism, authoritative presence and polyphony. Elegantly written, full of astute observations and witty paradoxes, this book reminds us that truly innovative literary criticism belongs both to scholarship and literature, and that an original analysis of a well-known literary text can not only satisfy intellectually but also excite aesthetically.”―Mark Lipovetsky, Professor, Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University About the Author Richard Tempest is an associate professor at the University of Illinois who studies the interactions between Russian and Western culture. His novel Zolotaya kost, about the adventures of a time