Overwriting Chaos

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-traveling American professor, was published in Moscow in 2004. Tempest’s current research focuses on charismatic politics in the twenty-first century.

“[A] massive and provocative book by the Slavist Richard Tempest has appeared, that aims to come to terms with the entirety of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘fictive worlds.’ With clarity and erudition, Tempest attempts to demonstrate how Solzhenitsyn used numerous experimental and modernist techniques to defend and revivify the realist tradition in literature, a tradition where good and evil are real and utterly palpable, where authentic heroes exist, and where an author committed to truth, responsibility, and the integrity of art manfully resists the chaos and nihilism of the age. Tempest… fully appreciates why Solzhenitsyn rejected ‘the howl of existentialism’ and fashionable but morally and culturally corrosive doctrines about ‘the death of the author.’ Solzhenitsyn refused to fiddle while Rome burned.”— Daniel J. Mahoney, Perspectives on Political Science“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

• AcknowledgmentsA Note on Translations andTransliterationsPrefaceTimeline of Solzhenitsyn’sLife and WorksPartOne: The Writer In Situ1. The Quilted Jerkin:Solzhenitsyn’s Life and Art2. Ice, Squared: “One Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich”3. “Turgenev Never Knew”: TheShorter Fictions of the 1950s and 1960s4. Meteor Man: Love the Revolution5. Helots and Heroes: In the First Circle6. Rebel versus Rabble: Cancer WardPartTwo: The Writer Ex Situ7. Twilight of All theRussias: The Red Wheel8. Return: The ShorterFictions of the 1990s9: Modernist?Appendix. Three Interviewswith Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2003–7)NotesSelected BibliographyIndex