August 1914

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‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the first month of the First World War the Russian campaign against the Germans creaks into gear. Crippled by weak, indecisive leadership the Russian troops battle desperately, even as the inevitability of failure and their own sacrifice dawns. Solzhenitsyn’s astounding work of historical fiction is a portrait of pre-revolutionary Russia, a tragic war story, and an epic novel in the great Russian tradition.

One of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century
Washington Post

About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.

Details

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 07/08/2014
ISBN: 9781448191376
Length: 832 pages
Price: £7.99

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Paperback 2014
Ebook 2014

August 1914

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One of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century

It is written in anger yet with understanding, in scorn yet with compassion. Its characters are universal and timeless. A great book. Read it for an understanding of the human condition in time of war and defeat

There is a magnificence about it; not in the writing…but in the determination to make the reader understand that here was a nation careening into a century more tragic for it than any has been for any nation ever

Solzhenitsyn's life…spanned all the decades of Soviet history, and his moral authority is unique among his generation

The great dissident's massive historical novel

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of those exceptional figures who had a message, a story to tell. Domineering and self-righteous, he was none the less a remarkable human being: a visionary, a crusader in the simplest sense, who was steered in his writing, as in his actions, by a deep sense of justice

It has been compared, at least in its sweep and intentions, with Tolstoy's War and Peace

Solzhenitsyn will be remembered in the short-term as the bard of the Gulag, a fearless tribune who exercised a crucial liberating influence at a decisive moment in Soviet history, but in the context of the ages, his works will be read so long as readers thirst for the truth about life on this planet

At his best, his writing stands comparison with Dostoevsky, and even when it does not…it has a purpose and ethical force that come from deep within him, honed in the gulags during long years staring at man's inhumanity to man straight in the face

Not only a great writer but also one who was passionately committed, believing it to be his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia's 20th-century experience for posterity

About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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