“War is Existence Itself”: Representations of the Authorial Self in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Story “Zhelyabuga Village”

Richard Tempest is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois. He is the author of books and articles on Russian literature and history, as well as a novel (writing as Roland Harrington), Golden Bone (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2004). He is currently completing a study of Solzhenitsyn’s literary works.

E-mail: davout697@gmail.com

An analysis of the authorial, autobiographical and diegetic layers of meaning in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two-part tale “Zhelyabuga Village,” with reference to the text’s structural binarism and its historical and polemical content.

Key words: Solzhenitsyn, “Zhelyabuga Village,” explication de texte, World War II, masculinity, military prose, village prose.

References 

1. Solzhenitsyn A. Apricot Jam and Other Stories. — Berkeley: Counter Point, 2011.