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.

• AcknowledgmentsA Note on Translations andTransliterationsPrefaceTimeline of Solzhenitsyn's Life and Works1. The Quilted Jerkin: Solzhenitsyn's Life and Art2. Ice, Squared: "One Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich"3. "Turgenev Never Knew": The Shorter 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 the Russias: The Red Wheel8. Return: The Shorter Fictions of the 1990s9: Modernist?Appendix. Three Interviews with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2003–7)NotesSelected BibliographyIndex

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