Overwriting Chaos : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds

“Born from the spirit of terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work has become the emblem of resistance and dignity. Connected to its Soviet origins in every minor detail, this literature is indispensable for our new global turmoil. Combining biography with close reading, Richard Tempest renders Solzhenitsyn’s complexity. From the epigraph from Auden to the concluding citation from Nietzsche, this book situates Solzhenitsyn among the great leaders of modern thought.”

—Alexander Etkind, Professor, European University Institute, Florence

“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.”

“In this monumental study of Solzhenitsyn’s art, Richard Tempest subjects the full range of the Russian writer’s literary works to a richly nuanced critical review. Political and biographical aspects provide contexts, but the focus invariably remains fixed on the literary qualities of the texts examined. And here Tempest is in his element: Conversant with the latest critical theories and easily familiar with all the masterworks of Russian and Western literature, he provides startingly fresh, insightful and often brilliant readings of virtually the entire corpus of Solzhenitsyn’s works. A magnificent tour de force!”

—Alexis Klimoff, Professor, Department of Russian Studies, Vassar College