© “List”
The publication is also on the occasion of 15 years since the death of the dissident writer
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Eleven stories by the Nobel laureate for literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn have been collected in the collection “Apricot Sweet”, announced the publishing house “List”. The book is published on the occasion of the 105th anniversary of the birth and 15 years since the death of the dissident writer.
Most stories written after 1994 are published for the first time in a translation by Boryana Darakchieva. The rest are in the well-known translations by Liliana Minkova and Manol Nakov. Cover artist is Damyan Damyanov.
“Solzhenitsyn is a challenge not only for translation, but also for readers. Because his works demand not so much to look back and judge the people of the past, but to look inside ourselves and ask ourselves about the future. That is exactly why he is a difficult author , because it does not allow us a comfortable distance, but confronts us with our own possible sins,” says Boryana Darakchieva, quoted by the publishing house.
Solzhenitsyn pondered for years the possibilities offered by the “narrative in two parts” genre. After completing the historical epic “The Red Wheel” in 1990, he returned to plots that were decades old, according to “List”.
Apricot jam
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“This genre just insists on life. I see several similar types of stories. The simplest is with the same character or two or three in both halves of the story, but separated by time – it may be little, but it may have passed and years. (Yes, this is an obvious and unsuspected detail that occurs in many literary plots.),” Solzhenitsyn said in an interview quoted by the publishing house.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) is a world-famous Russian writer and dissident who openly spoke out against the totalitarian system in the USSR. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for the moral force with which he continued the traditions of great Russian literature.” Before this triumph, his life presented the most difficult trials – in 1941 he was mobilized and participated in the Great Patriotic War, but even before its end he was arrested and sent to a labor camp by the Gulag system. Years later, based on his personal memories and the testimonies of other camp inmates, he wrote his fundamental artistic study “Gulag Archipelago”, ranked among the most significant books of the 20th century. It is called “the conscience of Russia”.
Here are the stories included in the collection “Apricot Jam”:
“Matryona’s House”, 1959;
“The Right Hand” – 1960;
“Case at Kochetovka Station”, 1962;
“The Sugar Bag”, 1965;
“What a pity”, 1965;
“Easter Crusade”, 1966;
“His”, 1994;
“Critical times”, 1994 – 1995;
“The New Youth”, 1993;
“Nastenka” 1993; 1995;
“Apricot Jam” – 1994
Solzhenitsyn’s century
