January

I haven't been posting much. Since Christmas day I've done two jigsaw puzzles, one 2000 pieces that was very challenging and one 500 pieces that I was told was quite hard that turned out to be a lark after the other puzzle. The first was a Ravensburger puzzle, well made and relatively expensive. The second was a bargain store no-name that had missing pieces, broken pieces and extra pieces and still wasn't all that hard. Both were fun in their own way.

I've been doing a 20 year old roll-playing game on the computer. I don't think I finished it when first bought it. I threw out the clue book/guide for it when I moved four years ago. My current neighbors have probably heard the total extent of my swearing vocabulary as I've be playing.

Also this month, I finally read Solzhenitsyn's November 1916 which I will discuss in a different post.

November 1916

For those who may not know, I went to graduate school for Russian language and literature and taught Russian Language at Ohio State for a number of years. I spent considerable time keeping up with what was current in Soviet lit in the days before the fall of the Soviet Union.

I would hope that younger folks have some idea of how important Soviet dissidents were in those days to us in the West. A number of them wrote stories, novels and plays. Some of them were quite poor writers, but we still read them anyway for their criticism of Soviet life. A few like the poet Joseph Brodsky and prose author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (both winning Nobel Prizes) were quite talented. (My grad school girlfriend made a successful career out of analyzing Brodsky. I didn't quite get that far in academia!)

I wasn't so interested in poetry, but I did follow Solzhenitsyn's writing career. He was best known for his works about the shocking depth and breadth of the Stalinist Gulag system. During the days of Nikita Khrushchev he was able to publish some of his work in the USSR. When the reactionary Leonid Brezhnev took power, all that ended. But there were channels open for writers to get their work to the West during Khrushchev's days that the Soviet government had trouble closing. So we in the West often had a better idea of what quality Soviet literature looked like than most Soviet citizens.

Eventually the Soviet government threw Solzhenitsyn out of their country. Suddenly presented with seemingly endless resources on Russian history unavailable in Soviet Russia, Solzhenitsyn's literary career went off in a very different direction. He spent about a decade and a half on research before he began to write again. Just a few years after November 1916 was published, the Soviet Union was gone and he was able to return to Russia and do more research there.

What was he researching? It was what was to be his master work that he'd begun before being forced to leave Russia. This sounds glorious in theory, but knowing a little about the history of Russian literature it sounded very ominous. ( Read more... )