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Абрикосовое варенье
Александр Исаевич Солженицын — выдающийся русский писатель, публицист, общественный деятель, лауреат Нобелевской премии по литературе («За нравственную силу, с которой он продолжил традиции великой русской литературы», 1970), лауреат Государственной премии Российской Федерации за выдающиеся достижения в области гуманитарной деятельности (2006), академик Российской академии наук, «совесть России». Первое же его произведение, рассказ «Один день Ивана Денисовича», опубликованный в «Новом мире» в 1962 году, принес ему всемирную славу. Потом увидели свет рассказы «Матренин двор», «Случай на станции Кочетовка», «Для пользы дела» и «Захар-Калита». На этом публикации прекратились. Больше ни строки в СССР не было напечатано, произведения писателя выходили в самиздате и за рубежом. В настоящем издании представлены произведения, созданные писателем в 1990-е годы. Читатель вошедших в сборник Рассказов и Крохоток сможет познакомиться с поздним творчеством А. И. Солженицына, почувствовать и поразмышлять вместе с писателем, разделившим в ХХ веке суровую судьбу России.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
284 books4,075 followersalso known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
August 21, 2019
It took me a while to get around to reviewing “Apricot Jam and Other Stories”; I really loved this little collection, which was my introduction to the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but it did give me quite a lot to feel and reflect on. In hindsight, that might have been a good move: starting with “Cancer Ward” or “The Gulag Archipelago” might have been a bit more than I was ready for (though I got copies of both and will not leave them to gather dust too long).
The stories in this book focus on the life of ordinary people: school teachers, soldiers, students and peasants, and the way Stalin’s regime affected their lives. So obviously, it’s not a basket of giggles. The little vignettes are intimate, written as if the narrator was confiding in Solzhenitsyn about how life had been in Russia while he was away. Some face ruin and destitution, moral corruption in order to survive the Soviet system (and it’s inherent sexism) or simply the destruction of their ideals – both political and artistic.
One of the things that struck me harder was the constant theme of incompetency: this is something that seems to come back over and over in literature related to the Soviet era, where people who found themselves in charge had no knowledge or experience of say, running a factory or baking bread, and the carelessness and inefficiency led to untold suffering. There is also something tragically ironic about a system supposedly installed to care for people, but where those with an ounce of power will ruthlessly, shamelessly hoard it at the obvious disadvantage of those less fortunate.
It’s the kind of stories that I would recommend reading slowly: give yourself time to really digest the content, as it can be pretty brutal. But Solzhenitsyn’s energy, his way of putting so much on the page while being so economical with his words make this an important portrait of a complicated and incredibly harsh time and place. Very recommended.
The stories in this book focus on the life of ordinary people: school teachers, soldiers, students and peasants, and the way Stalin’s regime affected their lives. So obviously, it’s not a basket of giggles. The little vignettes are intimate, written as if the narrator was confiding in Solzhenitsyn about how life had been in Russia while he was away. Some face ruin and destitution, moral corruption in order to survive the Soviet system (and it’s inherent sexism) or simply the destruction of their ideals – both political and artistic.
One of the things that struck me harder was the constant theme of incompetency: this is something that seems to come back over and over in literature related to the Soviet era, where people who found themselves in charge had no knowledge or experience of say, running a factory or baking bread, and the carelessness and inefficiency led to untold suffering. There is also something tragically ironic about a system supposedly installed to care for people, but where those with an ounce of power will ruthlessly, shamelessly hoard it at the obvious disadvantage of those less fortunate.
It’s the kind of stories that I would recommend reading slowly: give yourself time to really digest the content, as it can be pretty brutal. But Solzhenitsyn’s energy, his way of putting so much on the page while being so economical with his words make this an important portrait of a complicated and incredibly harsh time and place. Very recommended.
March 6, 2019
This is the first book I read from this author and it is not going to be the last. The short stories in this anthology are a perfect introduction to his writing style and the themes he covers. Although many of the stories here cover the military history of Russia, the harrowing treatment of entire communities, others take a look at individual biographies that left me shattered and deeply moved.
August 8, 2020
took awhile to get into this book but once I did loved it and felt like I was back in the soviet union
June 13, 2025
These uneven stories pair off, loosely. The title two contrast a hapless lad caught up in evasions as he tries to survive on a labor brigade. A chain gang by another name. He appeals to a Famous Writer of the Great Worker-Peasant Republic for assistance in extricating himself from slow starvation and fast exhaustion. The lauded champion of the proletariat responds in, let's say, long- accustomed fashion.
The next sagas illustrated the compromises exacted by the benevolent guardians of the CCCP from two fellows also endangered and entangled by machinations after the Revolution. To save their families, each has to decide, if that verb even's apt under totalitarianism, to betray their principles in exchange.
What happens as the undeserving students of a regime must be promoted on class status rather than merit sounds familiar. This system, after all, emerges from social engineering under Marxist dictates. The fate of a teacher who's cowed into passing a failed candidate, and that kid's own destiny, twist. It is the kind of decision which reverberates with a depth charge, however long delayed in its aftershock.
Similar pattern repeated with a girl, brought up holy and proper, who gradually gives in to the series of men who pressure her virtue. To make a living without their unwanted attention, and to raise her own girl, she becomes a schoolteacher. I found, given our era a century later with its indoctrinated, top-down curriculum advancing ideological purity and inculcating groupthink as justified and correct, this chronicle of capitulation to imposed state standards in socialist realism chilling and instructional.
But the WWII conflicts on the Eastern Front, although a marked shift in livelier tone, dialogue and first-person voice, didn't succeed as fiction. Neither those on Zhukov, wiping out "bandits" and later the Nazis. Nor a Cold War captain of industry for four decades as the Soviet Union totters, or a younger Russian who falls into organized crime as the USSR, if not quite the KGB "Organs," dissolves.
Too much of the collection plods, as clunky dramatization of difficulties under Party rule, in peace or battle, without revealing subtle character development. That opening one, and the teacher's tale, best managed to transcend recitals of events, or a general lack of plot. The final two--a quick parable about hypocrisy in the brass vs crackdown on the conscripts, and a riverboat ride revealing what used to flourish under Stalinism, despite odds, languishes as debris now--conclude this in better shape.
The next sagas illustrated the compromises exacted by the benevolent guardians of the CCCP from two fellows also endangered and entangled by machinations after the Revolution. To save their families, each has to decide, if that verb even's apt under totalitarianism, to betray their principles in exchange.
What happens as the undeserving students of a regime must be promoted on class status rather than merit sounds familiar. This system, after all, emerges from social engineering under Marxist dictates. The fate of a teacher who's cowed into passing a failed candidate, and that kid's own destiny, twist. It is the kind of decision which reverberates with a depth charge, however long delayed in its aftershock.
Similar pattern repeated with a girl, brought up holy and proper, who gradually gives in to the series of men who pressure her virtue. To make a living without their unwanted attention, and to raise her own girl, she becomes a schoolteacher. I found, given our era a century later with its indoctrinated, top-down curriculum advancing ideological purity and inculcating groupthink as justified and correct, this chronicle of capitulation to imposed state standards in socialist realism chilling and instructional.
But the WWII conflicts on the Eastern Front, although a marked shift in livelier tone, dialogue and first-person voice, didn't succeed as fiction. Neither those on Zhukov, wiping out "bandits" and later the Nazis. Nor a Cold War captain of industry for four decades as the Soviet Union totters, or a younger Russian who falls into organized crime as the USSR, if not quite the KGB "Organs," dissolves.
Too much of the collection plods, as clunky dramatization of difficulties under Party rule, in peace or battle, without revealing subtle character development. That opening one, and the teacher's tale, best managed to transcend recitals of events, or a general lack of plot. The final two--a quick parable about hypocrisy in the brass vs crackdown on the conscripts, and a riverboat ride revealing what used to flourish under Stalinism, despite odds, languishes as debris now--conclude this in better shape.
December 29, 2014
Quite often Solzhenitsyn deploys a distinctive technique of contrasting the live circumstances of two or three characters (or versions of the same character), allowing the bitter ironies of life in the Soviet Union to emerge from the juxtapositions. The author's political opinions are usually very obvious and there is an angry edge of polemic in the tone almost all the time. Much of the substance of the majority of these long stories though is extensive military detail. There isn't enough other stuff in it to really hold my interest. By the time I got to the end, I was just skimming.
August 27, 2012
We all have those inner albums of mental photographs taken at some moment of emotional impact, some event that knocks you out of your comfort zone and on your ear...Kennedy's assassination, the launching of the first Sputnik, 9/11. I remember where I was when I read the last words of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" -- words so cold and so bleak, they are not just devoid of hope but a great black hole where all hope dies.
Apricot Jam is evocative of that power. Solzenhitsen lulls us with simple story telling until we find outselves standing with our toes at the edge of an abyss, looking into the dark, and trying to find a reason to lean backwards. The stories are not nearly as powerful as "A Day in the Life," where we survive just one day in the thousands that Ivan Shukof will survive. But all the short stories here point in the same direction. What do we learn from Ivan, that wily zek, who doesn't give up and doesn't compromise his humanity? What precept is to be discerned when ordinary souls don't succumb to despair and just keep struggling and slogging onward? Not a one. Zip, nada, nothing. The only moral here is: Struggle all you want, retain your noble soul. That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee. Deal with it.
These short stories don't have the unforgettable impact of "Day," the reader is not left sucker punched and on the canvas; but like Solzenitsyn's greatest books, they have that same powerful simplicity and beautifully wrought sense of loss and hopelessness -- but without any trace of pity or pathos. Apricot Jam gives us that sense of claustrophobia and futility, of swimming upstream, that must be the daily burden carried by all intelligent people who live under a repressive regime.
There is a dry humor at work in the stories...Solzhenitsyn always adds an ironic twist. In Apricot Jam, he uses a literary device he terms "binary" to reinforce the irony. People and events from the past show up to complicate the present. There is an interconnect among the stories and a sting in the tail. Readers of O'Henry will be familiar with the process.
When he went back to Russia in 1994 and did a victory lap around what used to be the USSR, Solzhenitsyn had to be laughing to himself. The champagne and brandy soaked receptions with glad-handing petty Moscow bureaucrats who were his former judge and jury, the back-slapping commissars in Irkutsk and Vladivostok who, a few years earlier, were running the Gulag, not the Trans Siberian Railroad, must have been amusing indeed. But these stories show us that he wasn't buying their dog and pony show. One can imagine a little hardness behind the eyes whenever the writer clinked glasses and toasted "Na Zdrovie" to one of his former captors.
One last word re translation: It's possible to read The Gulag Archipelago or the Cancer Ward in one translation and come away with completely different vignettes than would someone who read a different version. "One Day in the Life" seems to have the fewest major discrepencies. The quality of translation here seems to be good. Much of Solzenhitsyn's playfulness with words and syntax appears to be present.
Apricot Jam is evocative of that power. Solzenhitsen lulls us with simple story telling until we find outselves standing with our toes at the edge of an abyss, looking into the dark, and trying to find a reason to lean backwards. The stories are not nearly as powerful as "A Day in the Life," where we survive just one day in the thousands that Ivan Shukof will survive. But all the short stories here point in the same direction. What do we learn from Ivan, that wily zek, who doesn't give up and doesn't compromise his humanity? What precept is to be discerned when ordinary souls don't succumb to despair and just keep struggling and slogging onward? Not a one. Zip, nada, nothing. The only moral here is: Struggle all you want, retain your noble soul. That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee. Deal with it.
These short stories don't have the unforgettable impact of "Day," the reader is not left sucker punched and on the canvas; but like Solzenitsyn's greatest books, they have that same powerful simplicity and beautifully wrought sense of loss and hopelessness -- but without any trace of pity or pathos. Apricot Jam gives us that sense of claustrophobia and futility, of swimming upstream, that must be the daily burden carried by all intelligent people who live under a repressive regime.
There is a dry humor at work in the stories...Solzhenitsyn always adds an ironic twist. In Apricot Jam, he uses a literary device he terms "binary" to reinforce the irony. People and events from the past show up to complicate the present. There is an interconnect among the stories and a sting in the tail. Readers of O'Henry will be familiar with the process.
When he went back to Russia in 1994 and did a victory lap around what used to be the USSR, Solzhenitsyn had to be laughing to himself. The champagne and brandy soaked receptions with glad-handing petty Moscow bureaucrats who were his former judge and jury, the back-slapping commissars in Irkutsk and Vladivostok who, a few years earlier, were running the Gulag, not the Trans Siberian Railroad, must have been amusing indeed. But these stories show us that he wasn't buying their dog and pony show. One can imagine a little hardness behind the eyes whenever the writer clinked glasses and toasted "Na Zdrovie" to one of his former captors.
One last word re translation: It's possible to read The Gulag Archipelago or the Cancer Ward in one translation and come away with completely different vignettes than would someone who read a different version. "One Day in the Life" seems to have the fewest major discrepencies. The quality of translation here seems to be good. Much of Solzenhitsyn's playfulness with words and syntax appears to be present.
August 23, 2014
Solzhenitsyn returns to his familiar place and time, the Soviet Union between two world wars. In these nine long stories, using a technique that makes two story lines connect (or not), he unravels the ills of communism and it’s legacy, an ideology that held him in its utopian promise during his formative years but later abandoned and punished him as he grew more enlightened.
In the title story, a young kulak (a landholding class) who has been rendered destitute by the Reds, writes to a celebrated Soviet writer asking for help and intercession; the writer, who lives in an affluent dacha, responds by remarking to his political buddies on how the language of this kulak mirrors the intensity of the times, he sees art in the situation and not the plight of the poor kulak. The story “Ego” is without hope, for it recounts an ill-fated peasant uprising within the Soviet Union, born of the corruption and ineptness of the Bolsheviks during their early years of rule; when the uprising founders, the leaders are forced to betray the rest of their comrades. In “Nashtenka,” two women bearing the same name are contrasted: one woman becomes a plaything of the bureaucrats in order to survive, the other resists moral decay and attempts to teach her students classic literature over the proletarian myths that have overtaken academia – a daunting task for literature has become subverted; “we don’t value a writer by what or by how he experiences life, but by his role in our proletarian movement.”
The stories “Adlig Schwenkitten,” “Zyelyabuga Village,” and “Times of Crisis” seem autobiographical, for they feature historical figures and involve characters mirroring the many roles that Solzhenitsyn played during World War II: commander of an instrument reconnaissance battalion, decorated war veteran, and chronicler of events. They are episodic stories involving military manoeuvres, technology and politics. The price of failure is to be sent to a “punishment battalion,” and you are only as good as your last victory. Stalin, who in real life had Solzhenitsyn committed to eight years of hard labour, is portrayed as a vacillating hypochondriac. The author’s involvement is so intense that in some instances we see him slipping from third person to second person to first person points of view – an editor’s nightmare, no doubt.
The last story “No Matter What” didn’t quite connect its binary story lines, but it concludes with the moral that “might is right” under communism, where no matter what wrong decisions the apparatchiks make, as long as they are protected up the chain of command, they will always be in the right. Joining the party was very compelling in those days, for it determined what job you got. And forget about education and landholding – they did not amount to much. Toe the party line, and you would be okay! Seems to happen in Wall St. too!
Of all the stories, I found “Fracture Points” the most interesting, for it contrasts an entrepreneurial Communist-era factory boss who becomes an oligarch in the vacuum created during the Soviet Union’s collapse, against the plight of a scientific-minded new-generation Russian who is forced to start a bank (one of the many that started and collapsed in the aftermath of Glasnost and Perestroika) and who is lost; the strong message here is that the new Russia is not a place for the idealistic but only one for old vets who are able to carve out stronger niches for themselves in the confusion of system change.
Towards the end of his days, Solzhenitsyn was criticized for being a man out of touch with the times, for being stuck in the time warp between the wars that had moulded his character. And yet, despite the narrative-heavy nature of these stories, and the inconsistencies in craft (blame it on translation!) he does pose interesting questions on humanity that make one pause.
In the title story, a young kulak (a landholding class) who has been rendered destitute by the Reds, writes to a celebrated Soviet writer asking for help and intercession; the writer, who lives in an affluent dacha, responds by remarking to his political buddies on how the language of this kulak mirrors the intensity of the times, he sees art in the situation and not the plight of the poor kulak. The story “Ego” is without hope, for it recounts an ill-fated peasant uprising within the Soviet Union, born of the corruption and ineptness of the Bolsheviks during their early years of rule; when the uprising founders, the leaders are forced to betray the rest of their comrades. In “Nashtenka,” two women bearing the same name are contrasted: one woman becomes a plaything of the bureaucrats in order to survive, the other resists moral decay and attempts to teach her students classic literature over the proletarian myths that have overtaken academia – a daunting task for literature has become subverted; “we don’t value a writer by what or by how he experiences life, but by his role in our proletarian movement.”
The stories “Adlig Schwenkitten,” “Zyelyabuga Village,” and “Times of Crisis” seem autobiographical, for they feature historical figures and involve characters mirroring the many roles that Solzhenitsyn played during World War II: commander of an instrument reconnaissance battalion, decorated war veteran, and chronicler of events. They are episodic stories involving military manoeuvres, technology and politics. The price of failure is to be sent to a “punishment battalion,” and you are only as good as your last victory. Stalin, who in real life had Solzhenitsyn committed to eight years of hard labour, is portrayed as a vacillating hypochondriac. The author’s involvement is so intense that in some instances we see him slipping from third person to second person to first person points of view – an editor’s nightmare, no doubt.
The last story “No Matter What” didn’t quite connect its binary story lines, but it concludes with the moral that “might is right” under communism, where no matter what wrong decisions the apparatchiks make, as long as they are protected up the chain of command, they will always be in the right. Joining the party was very compelling in those days, for it determined what job you got. And forget about education and landholding – they did not amount to much. Toe the party line, and you would be okay! Seems to happen in Wall St. too!
Of all the stories, I found “Fracture Points” the most interesting, for it contrasts an entrepreneurial Communist-era factory boss who becomes an oligarch in the vacuum created during the Soviet Union’s collapse, against the plight of a scientific-minded new-generation Russian who is forced to start a bank (one of the many that started and collapsed in the aftermath of Glasnost and Perestroika) and who is lost; the strong message here is that the new Russia is not a place for the idealistic but only one for old vets who are able to carve out stronger niches for themselves in the confusion of system change.
Towards the end of his days, Solzhenitsyn was criticized for being a man out of touch with the times, for being stuck in the time warp between the wars that had moulded his character. And yet, despite the narrative-heavy nature of these stories, and the inconsistencies in craft (blame it on translation!) he does pose interesting questions on humanity that make one pause.
January 27, 2022
AN INDIE READ
I didn’t really understand the term indie read, so I googled it. This collection of stories is a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn. I have been wanting to read his books for a while.
The title may suggest kid’s stories but they’re anything but. All the stories contain a trace of sadness from the tyranny of the yoke that was the Soviet Union. Even the story about Zhukov, a prominent general and responsible for the Soviet victory of Germany in the Second World War, is plagued by the oppressive regime and Stalin on his back.
If Dostoevsky had lived in the twentieth century he would have loved these sort of stories.
Dostoevsky suffered at the hands of an equally oppressive regime in the Tsars. The Bolshevik parliament was supposed to change all this but nothing changed. These stories are proof of that
I didn’t really understand the term indie read, so I googled it. This collection of stories is a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn. I have been wanting to read his books for a while.
The title may suggest kid’s stories but they’re anything but. All the stories contain a trace of sadness from the tyranny of the yoke that was the Soviet Union. Even the story about Zhukov, a prominent general and responsible for the Soviet victory of Germany in the Second World War, is plagued by the oppressive regime and Stalin on his back.
If Dostoevsky had lived in the twentieth century he would have loved these sort of stories.
Dostoevsky suffered at the hands of an equally oppressive regime in the Tsars. The Bolshevik parliament was supposed to change all this but nothing changed. These stories are proof of that
March 30, 2024
Dulceața de caise de Aleksandr Soljenițîn, tradusă de Cecilia Maticiuc ( 2011)
Știam demult că gusturile comunităților de cititori nu sunt neapărat o bună indicație, cel puțin pentru mine, atunci când îmi aleg o carte de citit. Și totuși, de data aceasta, m-am uitat la părerile de pe Goodreads: doar vreo 500 de păreri si un rating mediu de 3.6 din 5. În concluzie, Dulceața de caise nu e o carte prea populară, nici prea apreciată. Pe Babelio situația era și mai tristă: doar 15 recenzii, cu o medie de 3.3. Prin urmare, ce să fac, să citesc sau să mai amân?
Din fericire am ales să merg contra opiniilor generale și am avut o experiență de 5 stele… literare. Da, nu e o carte cu inimioare, ci cu inimi frânte, nu e cu sclipici, ci cu politruci și mai ales nu e despre deja- vu sau deja-lu, ci este o carte vie ca o călătorie în timp. În timpul lui Stalin, al lui Hrușciov, chiar al lui Gorbaciov. Dar și în timpul unor anonimi mai vii și mai memorabili decât faimoșii conducători politici.
Zicea Vargas Llosa că ,,trăim atâtea vieți câte cărți citim.” Doar că eu aș spune, că în cazul acestei colecții de povestiri, trăim atâtea vieți câte povestiri citim, cu intensitate și cu suferință. Cine și de ce ar vrea să citească în timpul liber cărți care îi rup sufletul, aceasta este întrebarea? Iar răspunsul meu este acesta: pentru că fiecare povestire din această colecție este despre cum golul spiritual nu poate dănui, nici măcar când iese victorios.
Știam demult că gusturile comunităților de cititori nu sunt neapărat o bună indicație, cel puțin pentru mine, atunci când îmi aleg o carte de citit. Și totuși, de data aceasta, m-am uitat la părerile de pe Goodreads: doar vreo 500 de păreri si un rating mediu de 3.6 din 5. În concluzie, Dulceața de caise nu e o carte prea populară, nici prea apreciată. Pe Babelio situația era și mai tristă: doar 15 recenzii, cu o medie de 3.3. Prin urmare, ce să fac, să citesc sau să mai amân?
Din fericire am ales să merg contra opiniilor generale și am avut o experiență de 5 stele… literare. Da, nu e o carte cu inimioare, ci cu inimi frânte, nu e cu sclipici, ci cu politruci și mai ales nu e despre deja- vu sau deja-lu, ci este o carte vie ca o călătorie în timp. În timpul lui Stalin, al lui Hrușciov, chiar al lui Gorbaciov. Dar și în timpul unor anonimi mai vii și mai memorabili decât faimoșii conducători politici.
Zicea Vargas Llosa că ,,trăim atâtea vieți câte cărți citim.” Doar că eu aș spune, că în cazul acestei colecții de povestiri, trăim atâtea vieți câte povestiri citim, cu intensitate și cu suferință. Cine și de ce ar vrea să citească în timpul liber cărți care îi rup sufletul, aceasta este întrebarea? Iar răspunsul meu este acesta: pentru că fiecare povestire din această colecție este despre cum golul spiritual nu poate dănui, nici măcar când iese victorios.
Read
August 26, 2011http://bookcents.blogspot.com/2011/08...
and
http://bookcents.blogspot.com/2011/08...
for more detail.
So how do I feel about the overall collection of stories? If I haven't made it clear in other posts, I enjoy much about Solzhenitsyn’s writing, fiction and nonfiction, so don’t expect a completely unbiased review (even though I think he's wrong in certain aspects of his overall framework). The strongest work in these pieces focus on life under communism. The stories on World War II appear to include personal experiences, which I found interesting but I realize such stories aren’t for everyone. Solzhenitsyn struggles in the stories (or parts of stories) set in the post-Soviet age—it’s clear he is unhappy about many things but his focus doesn’t consistently have the same bite. Which isn’t to say they aren’t good stories. It seems he was still working on how to evaluate and express his feelings on the changes in Russia, those for the good as well as for the bad. While there are no consistent themes across all the stories the feeling that a bad decision…such as missing an offered chance…lies at the heart of many unhappy or unfulfilled situations whether it be with individuals, groups, or the country. Literature, and the use/abuse of it by the Soviet system, comes in for its fair share of exposure but not to the same extent as the look at pivotal moments.
I recall seeing some announcements of this book saying this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn. If you’re looking to avoid his longer works for such an introduction, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would be a much better choice (although I want to put in a word for the longer works, too). I have no hesitation in recommending the first four stories of this collection to the general reader looking for a sample of Solzhenitsyn general style. The remaining stories gave me various levels of enjoyment but I realize not everyone has the same interest in the writer as I do. Solzhenitsyn has some characters in the 1920s express hope for the change in the direction the country was taking, hopes we know, without having to read further, will be dashed. Fewer characters in stories set in the 1990s express similar hopes as a result of recent changes. Their path still unfolds, but Solzhenitsyn didn't seem to think the results will be much different.
The stories employing a structure Solzhenitsyn called binary tales—two parts related by something tangible, a continuation of the same story but set years later, or simply two unrelated stories with a similar theme—can be uneven but when they click, such as the opening “Apricot Jam”, this approach adds to the story’s impact.
A few comments on the first four stories:
The first story, “Apricot Jam,” uses the so-called binary style. Part one of the story is a letter from a kulak (a relatively well-to-do peasant) serving a hard labor sentence to a famous Soviet writer responding to the writer’s claim that “the purpose and meaning of life” as “labor in a communist society” (Kenneth Lantz translated the five stories in this post). “To that I reply that there is queer small substance to this heroism and this labor because it comes from driving people like us nigh to we drop.” The peasant goes on to explain the loss of the family farm to collective agriculture and his current plight—nearly starving to death. He begs the writer for a food parcel while recalling the apricot tree in the orchard and the jam his mother made from the crop. Part two focuses on the famous writer in his posh dacha as he entertains a couple of guests, one a department head at the state publishing house. The writer and department head rival each other in praising socialist realism with such statements as “Creating an art of world significance—that is the task of the writer today. The world is waiting for examples, for architectonics from our literature.” The writer complains that other authors fail to use “the language Russians have been speaking for a thousand years” which he discovered when reading confessions coerced from torture. The writer, after flattering himself with the claim that “When I write, I can comprehend my reader through my imagination, and I can see exactly what he needs”, comments on the peasant’s letter. The writer swoons over the language in the letter but ignores the writer's plea. The symbolism of the apricot jam at the dacha reinforces the disconnect between the writer and his claims.
“Ego” and “The New Generation” look at what it takes for someone to sell out their principles. Physical threats are effective for some, not for others, but threats to family prove very effective in both of these stories.
Another “binary” story,“Nastenka,” follows the difficulties of two different women with the same name of the title. The first Nastenka has a rough life as she tries to eke out an existence as a librarian. Raped often by the men in her life, she takes control of her sexuality and uses it to become the mistress of a war hero with access to material comfort she didn't know was possible. The second Nastenka trains to be a literature teacher. While she guards her sexuality, she witnesses the rape of literature in the name of the common cause. Never quite sure what texts are approved or not, this Nastenka feels gratified when the students respond in an inspired fashion to propaganda. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t need to comment on the insipid poem generating their reaction, just as he didn’t have to remark on a literature student’s passionate harangues decrying the literature of the past.
and
http://bookcents.blogspot.com/2011/08...
for more detail.
So how do I feel about the overall collection of stories? If I haven't made it clear in other posts, I enjoy much about Solzhenitsyn’s writing, fiction and nonfiction, so don’t expect a completely unbiased review (even though I think he's wrong in certain aspects of his overall framework). The strongest work in these pieces focus on life under communism. The stories on World War II appear to include personal experiences, which I found interesting but I realize such stories aren’t for everyone. Solzhenitsyn struggles in the stories (or parts of stories) set in the post-Soviet age—it’s clear he is unhappy about many things but his focus doesn’t consistently have the same bite. Which isn’t to say they aren’t good stories. It seems he was still working on how to evaluate and express his feelings on the changes in Russia, those for the good as well as for the bad. While there are no consistent themes across all the stories the feeling that a bad decision…such as missing an offered chance…lies at the heart of many unhappy or unfulfilled situations whether it be with individuals, groups, or the country. Literature, and the use/abuse of it by the Soviet system, comes in for its fair share of exposure but not to the same extent as the look at pivotal moments.
I recall seeing some announcements of this book saying this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn. If you’re looking to avoid his longer works for such an introduction, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would be a much better choice (although I want to put in a word for the longer works, too). I have no hesitation in recommending the first four stories of this collection to the general reader looking for a sample of Solzhenitsyn general style. The remaining stories gave me various levels of enjoyment but I realize not everyone has the same interest in the writer as I do. Solzhenitsyn has some characters in the 1920s express hope for the change in the direction the country was taking, hopes we know, without having to read further, will be dashed. Fewer characters in stories set in the 1990s express similar hopes as a result of recent changes. Their path still unfolds, but Solzhenitsyn didn't seem to think the results will be much different.
The stories employing a structure Solzhenitsyn called binary tales—two parts related by something tangible, a continuation of the same story but set years later, or simply two unrelated stories with a similar theme—can be uneven but when they click, such as the opening “Apricot Jam”, this approach adds to the story’s impact.
A few comments on the first four stories:
The first story, “Apricot Jam,” uses the so-called binary style. Part one of the story is a letter from a kulak (a relatively well-to-do peasant) serving a hard labor sentence to a famous Soviet writer responding to the writer’s claim that “the purpose and meaning of life” as “labor in a communist society” (Kenneth Lantz translated the five stories in this post). “To that I reply that there is queer small substance to this heroism and this labor because it comes from driving people like us nigh to we drop.” The peasant goes on to explain the loss of the family farm to collective agriculture and his current plight—nearly starving to death. He begs the writer for a food parcel while recalling the apricot tree in the orchard and the jam his mother made from the crop. Part two focuses on the famous writer in his posh dacha as he entertains a couple of guests, one a department head at the state publishing house. The writer and department head rival each other in praising socialist realism with such statements as “Creating an art of world significance—that is the task of the writer today. The world is waiting for examples, for architectonics from our literature.” The writer complains that other authors fail to use “the language Russians have been speaking for a thousand years” which he discovered when reading confessions coerced from torture. The writer, after flattering himself with the claim that “When I write, I can comprehend my reader through my imagination, and I can see exactly what he needs”, comments on the peasant’s letter. The writer swoons over the language in the letter but ignores the writer's plea. The symbolism of the apricot jam at the dacha reinforces the disconnect between the writer and his claims.
“Ego” and “The New Generation” look at what it takes for someone to sell out their principles. Physical threats are effective for some, not for others, but threats to family prove very effective in both of these stories.
Another “binary” story,“Nastenka,” follows the difficulties of two different women with the same name of the title. The first Nastenka has a rough life as she tries to eke out an existence as a librarian. Raped often by the men in her life, she takes control of her sexuality and uses it to become the mistress of a war hero with access to material comfort she didn't know was possible. The second Nastenka trains to be a literature teacher. While she guards her sexuality, she witnesses the rape of literature in the name of the common cause. Never quite sure what texts are approved or not, this Nastenka feels gratified when the students respond in an inspired fashion to propaganda. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t need to comment on the insipid poem generating their reaction, just as he didn’t have to remark on a literature student’s passionate harangues decrying the literature of the past.
October 18, 2022
after reading an elif batuman interview where she mentioned being inspired to study russian after reading the gulag archipelago in high school (?) (i think) i decided to become an enthusiastic Solzhenitsyn fan and started borrowing and picking up his books from second hand bookstores and really getting into it but the problem is if all of his stuff is like this i don’t think i will like it at all. this book reminded me very much of an unseasoned piece of chicken that’s been boiled for an hour in that it was dry and bland and very difficult to get through. i know solzhenitsyn isn’t about to write about the horrors of the soviet regime in a pretty way but it just put me to sleep. the prose is extremely dry and dusty? and the stories are repetitive and sort of disjointed within themselves. i switched off for a lot of this. sorry
January 19, 2021
Mt first experience of Solzhenitsyn. After reading the first few stories I was disappointed. Was this the work of the Nobel Prize winning author who was made into a poster child in the 1980s?
To be sure, everyone even Nobel Prize winning authors have good and bad days. Nonetheless, I plowed on with Solzhenitsyn's stories.
It was with 'Times of Crisis' and 'Fracture Points' that the author made his greatness felt.
It's not so much the language but the cynical irony through which Solzhenitsyn pierces the frustrating realities of Life. Human endeavor, hopes and everything else all washed down the drain - almost in an amusing way - by the inevitable realities of Life.
All's well that ends well ... And Apricot Jam and Other Stories have introduced me to another class Russian (Soviet?) author. I will be looking for more works to read by Solzhenitsyn.
To be sure, everyone even Nobel Prize winning authors have good and bad days. Nonetheless, I plowed on with Solzhenitsyn's stories.
It was with 'Times of Crisis' and 'Fracture Points' that the author made his greatness felt.
It's not so much the language but the cynical irony through which Solzhenitsyn pierces the frustrating realities of Life. Human endeavor, hopes and everything else all washed down the drain - almost in an amusing way - by the inevitable realities of Life.
All's well that ends well ... And Apricot Jam and Other Stories have introduced me to another class Russian (Soviet?) author. I will be looking for more works to read by Solzhenitsyn.
July 4, 2023
Weirdly enough, I didn’t enjoy this selection as much as Solzhenitsyn’s other work. The eponymous short story was by far the best, and ‘Nastenka’ (the third story) was, imo, the only other good one in the entire collection. Pretty disappointing, really, given how talented Solzhenitsyn is.
December 16, 2023
Shorts on Soviet and post-Soviet history. There’s a lot of war but also education, literary culture, science, high officials.
February 8, 2012
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of my favourite books, but until now it was the only one of Solzhenitsyn's books i'd read.
i found the idea of pairing stories interesting -especially at this stage in his writing career - having seen soooooo much of Russian history unfold literally before his eyes.
two thoughts about writing occurred to me in thinking of this story collection. the first is the adage to write what you know. if that is one of the criteria for excellent writing, it is no wonder Solzhenitsyn mastered the art. he lived these times, these events, he knew these people. whether they are fiction or not - they feel true. the second thing that occured to me was something Hemmingway said about being concise. he said a writer should present the tip of an iceberg, and the reader should be able to perceive the huge, submerged mass that is driving the tip forward. here too i think Solzhenitsyn is a master. he writes simply of ordinary things but you can feel the massive driving force of geography and politics and war.
some of the pairs have the same character but the stories are divided by time - old men returning to the villages they visited as young soldiers in the first part of the story. one tells of two young women who share the same name. the first one is sexually promiscuous in order to solicit food and safety from the men she sleeps with. the second remains chaste but sells out her ideals and mimics party lines. both obviously just trying to survive. one is a man in a work camp writing a letter,sharing his thoughts and needs and despair, which is paired with the reaction of the recipient of the letter.
these stories - two sided and reflective - are the perfect ending to Solzhenitsyn's writing career.
i found the idea of pairing stories interesting -especially at this stage in his writing career - having seen soooooo much of Russian history unfold literally before his eyes.
two thoughts about writing occurred to me in thinking of this story collection. the first is the adage to write what you know. if that is one of the criteria for excellent writing, it is no wonder Solzhenitsyn mastered the art. he lived these times, these events, he knew these people. whether they are fiction or not - they feel true. the second thing that occured to me was something Hemmingway said about being concise. he said a writer should present the tip of an iceberg, and the reader should be able to perceive the huge, submerged mass that is driving the tip forward. here too i think Solzhenitsyn is a master. he writes simply of ordinary things but you can feel the massive driving force of geography and politics and war.
some of the pairs have the same character but the stories are divided by time - old men returning to the villages they visited as young soldiers in the first part of the story. one tells of two young women who share the same name. the first one is sexually promiscuous in order to solicit food and safety from the men she sleeps with. the second remains chaste but sells out her ideals and mimics party lines. both obviously just trying to survive. one is a man in a work camp writing a letter,sharing his thoughts and needs and despair, which is paired with the reaction of the recipient of the letter.
these stories - two sided and reflective - are the perfect ending to Solzhenitsyn's writing career.
Want to read
April 3, 2025I found out about this book while reading an article today by Roger Devlin. This isn’t really a review. It is a very long quotation from his article where he does a miniature review of his own. This story sounds fascinating.
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a wonderful story reflecting how an impressionable female mind functions within a different sick society marked by an equally distorted educational status hierarchy: early Soviet Russia. It is called Nastenka, and can be found in English translation in the collection Apricot Jam (the relevant narrative begins on p. 91). The story presents numerous suggestive analogies with the decadence and corruption of the contemporary West as described in this essay. Let us have a look.
Just before the revolution, Nastenka enrolls in “a classical high school, one of the best in Moscow.” It survives unchanged well into the 1920s because at that period the Bolsheviks have more pressing matters than educational policy to worry about. The young heroine becomes fascinated with the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century. “It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her.” At first, she simply enjoys the direct experience of reading, but gradually her teacher, a cultivated lady who received her education under the old regime, reveals to her the possibility of going deeper:
She learned to look at books in a new way—not just to live with the characters, but to live constantly with the author. How did he regard his characters? Was he the sole master of their lives, or where they independent of them? How did he organize this scene or that, and what words and phrases did he use in doing so?
Gradually Nastenka conceives the ambition of sharing her love of literature with the rising generation by becoming a teacher.
At age sixteen, one year before graduation, her family moves and she is thrust into an unfamiliar environment. At her new school “she couldn’t recognize the literature of the past in what was now being laid out before her in lectures.”
Though they did acknowledge, in passing, the musicality of Pushkin’s poetry (but never mentioned the transparent clarity of his perception of the world), they insistently pointed out that he expressed the mindset and ideology of the mid-level landowners during the incipient crisis of Russian feudalism. [The playwright] Ostrovsky reflected the decay of the feudal, serf-owning system and its displacement by developing industrial capitalism.
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Nastenka pores over the new Soviet literature textbook produced by some communist ideologue named Kogan, where she learns how “all these Onegins and Bolkonskys” (characters in Pushkin and Tolstoy respectively) are our class enemies. She quietly thinks: “That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!” But she cannot bring herself to question the overall validity of what she is being taught: “There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against Kogan. He couldn’t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them? . . . Surely they weren’t built on thin air?” She begins to feel a mixture of confusion and boredom that contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm for literature that initially inspired her choice of career.
Her boredom vanishes temporarily when she meets a charismatic young man named Shurik, overflowing with ideas that he expresses with extreme confidence. As we all know, women love confident men: “How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up?” The reader quickly perceives—although Nastenka herself never does—the reason for Shurik’s self-assurance. He is a communist militant who follows the party line unswervingly. He knows exactly what he is supposed to say about everything under the sun. Nastenka drinks up his every word, and a romance begins. But soon he is pressing her to consummate the relationship, and something inside her tells her that, at the very least, it is not yet time. Concerning early Soviet manhood in general, she reflects: “None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings.”
So Shurik breaks off with her and demonstratively ignores her for the rest of the time they are in class together. Soon he is called to Moscow and a no doubt successful rise within the official status hierarchy of the Soviet literary world. Nastenka is left broken-hearted. The reader understands—as she herself does not—that she has barely avoided a spiritual landmine.
Time passes and Nastenka, now addressed at Anastasia Dmitrievna, is put in charge of a class: “At long last, her dream had come true [and] she could pour into [her students’] heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature” (as well as “make sure these little boys become decent men, not like the ones today”).
One day she is handed a new literature textbook meant to guide her own teaching. In it a major Soviet author is quoted as stating: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.” She wonders, “How could you possibly present that to the children?” Yet this writer is “a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind challenge him?”
By this time the Soviet curriculum is tightly controlled. She makes the best of things, teaching “all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature.” On her own time, however, she organizes an after-school literary circle for a dozen or so of her best students where she “takes them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included on the syllabus.” But word gets out and she is ordered to stop. “Enough harping on the classics! It distracts the students from life.”
Nastenka’s fate is the tragedy of a promising young female mind stunted due to an inability to trust its own healthy instincts and question what it receives from a corrupt authority. She senses the gulf separating the great literature she learned to love in her youth from the Marxist rubbish she is forced to impart, but never breaks through to clear insight about her situation. Perhaps most fascinatingly, she dimly perceives that this cultural decline bears some relation to the contrast between the men of her own time who insist on getting straight down to business with women and the Onegins and Bolkonskys who “certainly knew how to love in those days.””
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a wonderful story reflecting how an impressionable female mind functions within a different sick society marked by an equally distorted educational status hierarchy: early Soviet Russia. It is called Nastenka, and can be found in English translation in the collection Apricot Jam (the relevant narrative begins on p. 91). The story presents numerous suggestive analogies with the decadence and corruption of the contemporary West as described in this essay. Let us have a look.
Just before the revolution, Nastenka enrolls in “a classical high school, one of the best in Moscow.” It survives unchanged well into the 1920s because at that period the Bolsheviks have more pressing matters than educational policy to worry about. The young heroine becomes fascinated with the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century. “It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her.” At first, she simply enjoys the direct experience of reading, but gradually her teacher, a cultivated lady who received her education under the old regime, reveals to her the possibility of going deeper:
She learned to look at books in a new way—not just to live with the characters, but to live constantly with the author. How did he regard his characters? Was he the sole master of their lives, or where they independent of them? How did he organize this scene or that, and what words and phrases did he use in doing so?
Gradually Nastenka conceives the ambition of sharing her love of literature with the rising generation by becoming a teacher.
At age sixteen, one year before graduation, her family moves and she is thrust into an unfamiliar environment. At her new school “she couldn’t recognize the literature of the past in what was now being laid out before her in lectures.”
Though they did acknowledge, in passing, the musicality of Pushkin’s poetry (but never mentioned the transparent clarity of his perception of the world), they insistently pointed out that he expressed the mindset and ideology of the mid-level landowners during the incipient crisis of Russian feudalism. [The playwright] Ostrovsky reflected the decay of the feudal, serf-owning system and its displacement by developing industrial capitalism.
Subscribe to New Columns
Nastenka pores over the new Soviet literature textbook produced by some communist ideologue named Kogan, where she learns how “all these Onegins and Bolkonskys” (characters in Pushkin and Tolstoy respectively) are our class enemies. She quietly thinks: “That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!” But she cannot bring herself to question the overall validity of what she is being taught: “There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against Kogan. He couldn’t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them? . . . Surely they weren’t built on thin air?” She begins to feel a mixture of confusion and boredom that contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm for literature that initially inspired her choice of career.
Her boredom vanishes temporarily when she meets a charismatic young man named Shurik, overflowing with ideas that he expresses with extreme confidence. As we all know, women love confident men: “How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up?” The reader quickly perceives—although Nastenka herself never does—the reason for Shurik’s self-assurance. He is a communist militant who follows the party line unswervingly. He knows exactly what he is supposed to say about everything under the sun. Nastenka drinks up his every word, and a romance begins. But soon he is pressing her to consummate the relationship, and something inside her tells her that, at the very least, it is not yet time. Concerning early Soviet manhood in general, she reflects: “None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings.”
So Shurik breaks off with her and demonstratively ignores her for the rest of the time they are in class together. Soon he is called to Moscow and a no doubt successful rise within the official status hierarchy of the Soviet literary world. Nastenka is left broken-hearted. The reader understands—as she herself does not—that she has barely avoided a spiritual landmine.
Time passes and Nastenka, now addressed at Anastasia Dmitrievna, is put in charge of a class: “At long last, her dream had come true [and] she could pour into [her students’] heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature” (as well as “make sure these little boys become decent men, not like the ones today”).
One day she is handed a new literature textbook meant to guide her own teaching. In it a major Soviet author is quoted as stating: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.” She wonders, “How could you possibly present that to the children?” Yet this writer is “a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind challenge him?”
By this time the Soviet curriculum is tightly controlled. She makes the best of things, teaching “all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature.” On her own time, however, she organizes an after-school literary circle for a dozen or so of her best students where she “takes them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included on the syllabus.” But word gets out and she is ordered to stop. “Enough harping on the classics! It distracts the students from life.”
Nastenka’s fate is the tragedy of a promising young female mind stunted due to an inability to trust its own healthy instincts and question what it receives from a corrupt authority. She senses the gulf separating the great literature she learned to love in her youth from the Marxist rubbish she is forced to impart, but never breaks through to clear insight about her situation. Perhaps most fascinatingly, she dimly perceives that this cultural decline bears some relation to the contrast between the men of her own time who insist on getting straight down to business with women and the Onegins and Bolkonskys who “certainly knew how to love in those days.””
October 30, 2013
I found this new collection of short stories in my local Kyiv bookstore and was intrigued. What little gems had Solzhenitsyn penned between his return Russia in 1994 and his death in 2008? What had they found in his papers, who had collected and translated them?
Mostly written in his late binary style, the stories in Apricot Jam present a series of striking portraits of Soviet and Russian life across the twentieth century. They span the period from, and the binary device allows Solzhenitsyn to jump decades to see what has become of his characters from the earlier tale. As usual, the upheavals that destroyed so many lives in the Soviet Union throughout the century are the main theme.
From my vantage point in Kyiv in the 21st Century, the tale of Ego was perhaps touching; a tale set in the Tambov rebellion of the early 1920's which was surely a precursor to the destruction of the Kulaks in Ukraine a few years later.
And the two stories set in the Great Patriotic War: Aldig Schwenkitten and Zhelabuga village, who share the same characters; all are vignettes of the larger tale that has yet to be told.
If anyone has never read any Solzhenitsyn, I guess the starting point should still be One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as the impact of this story can never be underestimated. In the end Solzhenitsyn outlived the monstrous regime that tried to destroy him. A pity not many modern Russians or other ex-Soviet citizens have read his works, but I can understand why they do not want to start. They have new lives to lead, and sometimes it is better to forget what cannot be changed and move on. But in the corner, just in case we forget, we should keep a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to remind us of the past...
Mostly written in his late binary style, the stories in Apricot Jam present a series of striking portraits of Soviet and Russian life across the twentieth century. They span the period from, and the binary device allows Solzhenitsyn to jump decades to see what has become of his characters from the earlier tale. As usual, the upheavals that destroyed so many lives in the Soviet Union throughout the century are the main theme.
From my vantage point in Kyiv in the 21st Century, the tale of Ego was perhaps touching; a tale set in the Tambov rebellion of the early 1920's which was surely a precursor to the destruction of the Kulaks in Ukraine a few years later.
And the two stories set in the Great Patriotic War: Aldig Schwenkitten and Zhelabuga village, who share the same characters; all are vignettes of the larger tale that has yet to be told.
If anyone has never read any Solzhenitsyn, I guess the starting point should still be One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as the impact of this story can never be underestimated. In the end Solzhenitsyn outlived the monstrous regime that tried to destroy him. A pity not many modern Russians or other ex-Soviet citizens have read his works, but I can understand why they do not want to start. They have new lives to lead, and sometimes it is better to forget what cannot be changed and move on. But in the corner, just in case we forget, we should keep a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to remind us of the past...
May 14, 2012
I mostly snagged this so I can say I have read Solzhenitsyn, even if it's not one of his famous publications. These stories are good snapshots of a certain time and place (pre-1950, post-Revolutionary Soviet Union) and while they differ in major details, they are similar in tone. The tone is dismal, somewhat cynical, and angry at the corruption of the country that continued after the fall (and murder) of the Tsar. Nothing changed, except that different people were running things, and poor people still starved.
I didn't finish all the stories. I got through two that were more-or-less centered on the Eastern Front during World War II, and just couldn't swallow anymore. I wouldn't have made it that far if I didn't know some history of the era, though. The most memorable one for was a very depressing story about a young idealistic college graduate trying to teach Russian literature to children; every year the curriculum changes, the ideology changes, the list of "allowed" authors changes...horrible.
I didn't finish all the stories. I got through two that were more-or-less centered on the Eastern Front during World War II, and just couldn't swallow anymore. I wouldn't have made it that far if I didn't know some history of the era, though. The most memorable one for was a very depressing story about a young idealistic college graduate trying to teach Russian literature to children; every year the curriculum changes, the ideology changes, the list of "allowed" authors changes...horrible.
Read
October 18, 2011In his novels such as the Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksarndr Solzhenitsyn recounted and renounced Soviet oppression, earning him imprisonment, exile, a Nobel Prize and an acknowledged role in the defeat of communism. Some of his final published works are available for the first time in Apricot Jam and Other Stories.
Read an interview with the late author's son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, in the October/November 2011 issue of Shelf Magazine. http://www.pagegangster.com/p/3YczN/
Read an interview with the late author's son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, in the October/November 2011 issue of Shelf Magazine. http://www.pagegangster.com/p/3YczN/
February 28, 2025
Two of these stories I really enjoyed - The New Generation was a 5 star read for me, and Nastenka was 4 stars as soon as I realised that it features two completely separate women who happen to share the same name. (Up until that point it wasn't bad, I was just confused.) But the rest of this collection heaved its way along with a dry, painstaking precision; too many stories prioritised impersonal descriptions of military movement over plot or emotional pull. I was reminded periodically of the Very Short Introduction series: there were simply too many names thrown around here with too little personality to feel real.
February 13, 2017
Either wrong time to read this particular book or something about the prose just kept losing me and i had to force myself back in. Apricot Jam is easily my favourite, the rest had really good moments but couldn't keep me hooked long enough.
December 29, 2022
Te veel namen, moeilijker leesbaar. Sommige verhaaltjes wel heel leuk.
September 30, 2020
Nine short stories by one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Even though they are short stories, you really have to read them as a whole to get the most out of them, the whole is greater than its parts. There is a lot about socialist Russia, war and corruption, but I think the best are when there is a zoom in on how it effects the people. This isn't an important work by the standards of solzhenitsyn but it is important as speaking up about how indoctrination of evil ideas can come about and destroy people's lifes. Highlights ~ "apricot jam" "ego" "the new generation" " nastenka" and "times of crisis".
March 15, 2013
This newer collection of short stories is a fascinating view of Russian history through the twentieth century. Solzhenitsyn covers pre-Soviet Russia all the way to the collapse of Soviet Russia. Various characters are situated in different eras, some even with the perspective of history, looking back on the old days.
It is fascinating how he's able to maintain each character's perspective without moralizing. He gives each character their own opinions on communism, various leaders, Marx, and so on. Rather than give them the unanimous opinion of condemnation on communist abominations, each character represents the breadth of perspective natural to man. There are some condemnations, but they're mostly communists who condemn certain people, bad management, etc.--but never the evil system itself.
Solzhenitsyn has done that elsewhere, here he allows his characters to live as real Russians lived--struggling with the system they were given, understanding their world in the terms they're given and the language they were taught--namely Bolshevism.
Yet it is a brutal, inhuman system. This is obvious right away in the first story, "Apricot Jam." Yet these are real people facing the evil of Soviet communism.
This is a great collection of stories and a great place to wet your feet with Solzhenitsyn. Highly recommended.
It is fascinating how he's able to maintain each character's perspective without moralizing. He gives each character their own opinions on communism, various leaders, Marx, and so on. Rather than give them the unanimous opinion of condemnation on communist abominations, each character represents the breadth of perspective natural to man. There are some condemnations, but they're mostly communists who condemn certain people, bad management, etc.--but never the evil system itself.
Solzhenitsyn has done that elsewhere, here he allows his characters to live as real Russians lived--struggling with the system they were given, understanding their world in the terms they're given and the language they were taught--namely Bolshevism.
Yet it is a brutal, inhuman system. This is obvious right away in the first story, "Apricot Jam." Yet these are real people facing the evil of Soviet communism.
This is a great collection of stories and a great place to wet your feet with Solzhenitsyn. Highly recommended.
April 1, 2012
Written in the years between Solzhenitsyn's return from exile to Russia in 1994, and his death in 2008 this new collection of stories from the Nobel Prize-winning author is available for the first time in English. Mostly written in his late binary style, the stories in Apricot Jam present a series of striking portraits of a Soviet and Russian life across the twentieth century. Through their unforgettable cast of military commanders, imprisoned activists and displaced families, these stories play out the moral dilemmas and ideological conflicts that defined the century.
Apparently someone has said that this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn—no doubt some publicist—and I can’t disagree, the first few stories anyway, but much better to dive straight into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and then find a copy of the new translation of In the First Circle which I hear is good. For those familiar with his work and still interested—perhaps that’s the key here—there is more here, though, than just wallowing in the past.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
Apparently someone has said that this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn—no doubt some publicist—and I can’t disagree, the first few stories anyway, but much better to dive straight into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and then find a copy of the new translation of In the First Circle which I hear is good. For those familiar with his work and still interested—perhaps that’s the key here—there is more here, though, than just wallowing in the past.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
July 17, 2014
this has been rather disappointing. Grueling descriptions of life in the early time of the Soviet Union, but not really interesting as literature. Maybe deliberately so: the title story (maybe the best) thematizes the problems of aesthetization of language in view of actual terror. Still, I think, this does not work as literature. Solzhenitsyn uses what he apparently calls a binary style, which mainly means: all stories have two parts that are sometimes more, sometimes less obviously connected. Maybe that is part of the problem: the world is not just binary.
June 22, 2018
I was not sufficiently patient to work with the slow narration and ponderous pacing of the first story in this collection. So it may have been merely my own condition, or it may have been that Solzhenitsyn can and does write tediously. When I couldn't sustain enough interest to finish the first story -- I initially wrote "sentence," there, which may more accurately reflect my feelings about this book -- I paid my overdue fine and left it behind in the library where the torpid activity suggests it may take months or years for another reader even to notice it.
March 16, 2015
Powerful collection of short stories about ordinary Russians during the Revolution, Soviet times, and post-Soviet period. Solzhenitsyn is a master storyteller, and he develops his characters well, and sheds light on peoples' lives during the Soviet period.
September 23, 2015
Anyone who is not knowledgeable on the changing politics of early 20th century Russia may not find many of these stories very interesting.
September 9, 2012
saw this on the shelf whilst on vacation...this 7-hr layover at o'hare...yippee ki aye...some outfit called 'barbara's bookstore' or close...so...i bought it, began to read somewhere over the midwest, 27,000-feet, on board one of those jets made by canadians...a pu-36 maybe...i forget exactly what jet number it is...but i suspect that that factoid is something someone on the ball would have stored away somewhere...maybe in their little black book of notables.
this is only the 2nd from solzhenitsyn...most of his big heavy thick door-stoppers were in the wire racks at the high school library..way back when...not like the elementary school had a "library"...one size fits all...books are like jewelry, hey? some pieces are gaudy and only a real diva would wear that...and others are real gems that only the feelthy reech can afford, no?
this one begins:
story one: "apricot jam"
my mind is awhirl right now, and if some of the things i say don't seem quite right i want you to keep reading, you won't be wasting your time. i've heard that you're a famous writer. i got a little book of your articles out of the library. (i've been to school--the one in our village.) i had no time to read the whole book...
onward & upward...
...too, meant to say after announcing this as the 2nd from solz-zhee, that all those big thick tomes he had, escape from the gulag (books one, two three and seventy)....the cancer ward...(a real appetizing title, that)...and the other'ns...all those pages filled w/black...anyway, the other i read was that one day in the life of whoever...a thin volume, comparatively-speaking...i'm trying to remember if they threw a galvanized garbage can into the place where they put us to sleep for the night and i think they did...
story 2: "ego"
even before he reached his thirties, even before the german war, pavel vasilyevich ektov realized that he was a confirmed and perhaps even a natural-born activist in the rural cooperative movement, and so he never took up any of the grandiose, earth-shaking causes of the time.
this story is...intense...'ego' is the name given to pavel after he is captured...there are the various forces during the early days?...the revolution...bolsheviks...others...other forces...peasants...kulaks...this that the other. one side triumphs and others die horrible deaths. this is what we know. but while captured, he is interrogated...why? pray tell...incredible, the sum total of man...anyway...it moves on from there...like dragging death through the street....seems an apt metaphor...dragging death through the street...this is what we know. intense...imagine being forced, against your will, to do the unimaginable. imagine that. that is this story. dragging death through the street. (or a horse named bill)
story 3: "the new generation"
they were writing the strengths of the materials exam.
anatoly pavlovich vozdvizhensky, an engineer and associate professor in the faculty of civil engineering, could see that his student konoplyov's face was very flushed. he had broken into a sweat and had missed his turn to come up to the examiner's desk. then, with a heavy gait, he approached and quietly asked for a different set of questions. anatoly pavlovich gazed at the sweaty face beneath a low forehead and met the desperate, imploring look in his bright eyes--and he gave him some new questions.
so yeah okay...by story end, the teacher is the prisoner and the student has sway. and so it goes. either this story, the one before, or the one after, too...there's this idea about who rises to "lead" as the revolution develops...'the new generation'...when it happens in america...it will be the usual suspects.
story 4: "nastenka"
is a gal, her parents died young...
nastenka's parents died young, and her grandfather, father filaret, who by then had also lost his wife, raised her from the age of five. the girl lived in his house in the village of milostayki until she was twelve, through the years of the german war and the revolution.
follows her life onward and upward, or not...mostly not...as she is repeatedly...raped...although solshenitsyn does not once use that word...as if...it is common practice and there is no recourse...she comes to love it and he does use a word like 'love' though what exactly i've forgotten already.
this story is interesting for what it says about 'learning' and 'education'...as it develops in revolutionary russia...interesting for what it says, coupled w/the terms in the glossary...a lot of names, mostly, but there was in russia, apparently, a kind of 'education' in keeping w/the politics of the time. i guess w/the lack of an establishment media--nbc, cns, cnn, abc, fox, l.a. times, n.y. times etc or whatever the latin appropriate is...et al? this story is interesting for the things they read...the books...the titles presented...and the reason given--this that the other is in-keeping with the politics of the time...this that the other is not.
there's a number of names in this story...literary names...titles...curious, curious times. and too, i can't help but think about out own culture, the call for a certain kind of story? yes. i believe that happens...i believe, in fact, that i've seen that exhibited here at goodreads. i won't spoil it for you to list those names that were forbidden in russia at the time...while others...who toed the party line, were at the forefront, dry boolsheet of the purest ray serene, sounds like...as nastenka wants to opens the eyes of her students...curious stuff here.
i'll call it what it is: fashionable ideology...and...i cannot state clearly what i thought i saw, yay ago...a year? more? less?...i dunno. not like i keep a record of this boolsheet of the purest ray serene...but it was a call for homosexual literature...send in your gay stories...yay! boy howdy! more cock-sucking and butt-focking! eating that lesbian stew! anal tongue darts! it's the fashion! call one! call all! okay, so the basic chant was a call for gay stories. like i said, fashionable ideology. they didn't write the story...the story wrote them.
story 5: "adlig schwenkitten"
subtitled a tale of twenty-four hours"
dedicated to the memory of major pavel afanasyevich boyev and
major vladimir kondratyevich baluev
begins:
on the night of january 25-26, the army artillery staff informed the staff of our artillery brigade that our forward tank corps had broken through to the baltic coast! east prussia, therefore, had been cut off from germany.
so this is a story of the world war...i assume the 2nd...and...the one that follows is another, has some of the same characters. this artillery outfit is alone...waiting for infantry...setting up. people die. some survive.
story 6: "zhelyabuga village"
three days ago out troops moved through the breach on the river neruch. for these past days, my central station has been located inside a smokestack by the railway embankment. the brickwork was solid and gave good protection from enemy shelling. some peasant women with their little ones had crowded in with us, and a couple of dozen gypsies who had popped up from somewhere had also settle in...
like i said, this one too, about the world war. solzhenitsyn goes into some detail about this artillery outfit..."a sound-ranging battery"...interesting to me, navy-time, ngfs...naval gun-fire support...so i'm a bit familiar with the...logistics...the math involved...yeah so like he goes into detail about stringing out lines to the various posts, connected to the "central station" where they plot targets based on the info they can gather.
i'm reminded of our lone 5-inch gun on the fo'c'sle...the barrel rising and falling w/the movement of the sea...how things have changed...how efficient we are. heh.
then...the story takes a great leap forward...time...and some of the old-timers have a kind of reunion...they go to this place...there is an old woman there, wrinkled...there are many old women there...they set up a skirmish line, not allowing these men...and the yucky-yuck with them...to leave...not until they get some word of bread. they want bread. they expect bread. they cannot live without bread. they are promised more...yes, it is agreed...there should be bread...
i imagine the two ideas...the detail about the artillery, the need, the desire for accuracy, for information...and then the old women, i imagine those two ideas are juxtaposed for a reason. enough said.
story 7: "times of crisis"
yorka zhukov, born into a peasant family, could handle a rake at hay cutting when he was seven and helped around the family farm as he got older, though he finished the three-year parish school. then his father sent him all the way to moscow as an errand boy and apprentice to a distant, wealthy relative, a furrier. that's where he grew up, starting as a servant, running errands and working bit by bit until his mastered the furrier's trade.
..."but the german war broke out, and in 1915..."
so sounds like this one is about the world war...the 1st perhaps...were the previous 2 about the 1st, as well? no...seems in one of them i read about the finnish war, too...a character who had seen it all, etc.
follows the life of zhukov...the war years...the ups & downs of communicating w/stalin...changes to 1st person after ten or less pages...back to third after a few...after a mingling of 1st and 2nd...all this intrigue and plotting, conniving and scheming. i wonder if any were immune to it? go elsewhere for a time and discover your position has been eliminated. heh!
and too, when he begins to write his memoirs, there is present the 'writers block' that dictates yes no maybe...me too...like the song? everyday people?...like that...the story provides the impression...as it starts...that zhukov...is everyday people, above the fray...anyway...onward upward
story 8: "fracture points"
who didn't go hungry that year? though his father was a shop foreman, he never "picked up" anything extra and never allowed anyone else to do so. in the family were his mother, grandmother, sister, and mitya, almost seventeen, and all of them so hungry! he would stand by his lathe all day and then at night it was off in a boat with a friend to catch some fish.
story 9: "no matter what"
supper for the reserve regiment was served at six in the evening, even though lights-out did not come until ten. someone had correctly figured that the men would get by without any more food that way, and would sleep through until morning.
midway...the timeline advances to...what? 'present'-day? perhaps. even then, food is a problem...bread...bread bread. all will proceed according to plan.
a sense of a people and place struggling toward...what? modernity?...toward bread...barely making it. the old, the new...or new ways of management...none of which seem to be the solution and so it goes...all will proceed according to plan.
this is only the 2nd from solzhenitsyn...most of his big heavy thick door-stoppers were in the wire racks at the high school library..way back when...not like the elementary school had a "library"...one size fits all...books are like jewelry, hey? some pieces are gaudy and only a real diva would wear that...and others are real gems that only the feelthy reech can afford, no?
this one begins:
story one: "apricot jam"
my mind is awhirl right now, and if some of the things i say don't seem quite right i want you to keep reading, you won't be wasting your time. i've heard that you're a famous writer. i got a little book of your articles out of the library. (i've been to school--the one in our village.) i had no time to read the whole book...
onward & upward...
...too, meant to say after announcing this as the 2nd from solz-zhee, that all those big thick tomes he had, escape from the gulag (books one, two three and seventy)....the cancer ward...(a real appetizing title, that)...and the other'ns...all those pages filled w/black...anyway, the other i read was that one day in the life of whoever...a thin volume, comparatively-speaking...i'm trying to remember if they threw a galvanized garbage can into the place where they put us to sleep for the night and i think they did...
story 2: "ego"
even before he reached his thirties, even before the german war, pavel vasilyevich ektov realized that he was a confirmed and perhaps even a natural-born activist in the rural cooperative movement, and so he never took up any of the grandiose, earth-shaking causes of the time.
this story is...intense...'ego' is the name given to pavel after he is captured...there are the various forces during the early days?...the revolution...bolsheviks...others...other forces...peasants...kulaks...this that the other. one side triumphs and others die horrible deaths. this is what we know. but while captured, he is interrogated...why? pray tell...incredible, the sum total of man...anyway...it moves on from there...like dragging death through the street....seems an apt metaphor...dragging death through the street...this is what we know. intense...imagine being forced, against your will, to do the unimaginable. imagine that. that is this story. dragging death through the street. (or a horse named bill)
story 3: "the new generation"
they were writing the strengths of the materials exam.
anatoly pavlovich vozdvizhensky, an engineer and associate professor in the faculty of civil engineering, could see that his student konoplyov's face was very flushed. he had broken into a sweat and had missed his turn to come up to the examiner's desk. then, with a heavy gait, he approached and quietly asked for a different set of questions. anatoly pavlovich gazed at the sweaty face beneath a low forehead and met the desperate, imploring look in his bright eyes--and he gave him some new questions.
so yeah okay...by story end, the teacher is the prisoner and the student has sway. and so it goes. either this story, the one before, or the one after, too...there's this idea about who rises to "lead" as the revolution develops...'the new generation'...when it happens in america...it will be the usual suspects.
story 4: "nastenka"
is a gal, her parents died young...
nastenka's parents died young, and her grandfather, father filaret, who by then had also lost his wife, raised her from the age of five. the girl lived in his house in the village of milostayki until she was twelve, through the years of the german war and the revolution.
follows her life onward and upward, or not...mostly not...as she is repeatedly...raped...although solshenitsyn does not once use that word...as if...it is common practice and there is no recourse...she comes to love it and he does use a word like 'love' though what exactly i've forgotten already.
this story is interesting for what it says about 'learning' and 'education'...as it develops in revolutionary russia...interesting for what it says, coupled w/the terms in the glossary...a lot of names, mostly, but there was in russia, apparently, a kind of 'education' in keeping w/the politics of the time. i guess w/the lack of an establishment media--nbc, cns, cnn, abc, fox, l.a. times, n.y. times etc or whatever the latin appropriate is...et al? this story is interesting for the things they read...the books...the titles presented...and the reason given--this that the other is in-keeping with the politics of the time...this that the other is not.
there's a number of names in this story...literary names...titles...curious, curious times. and too, i can't help but think about out own culture, the call for a certain kind of story? yes. i believe that happens...i believe, in fact, that i've seen that exhibited here at goodreads. i won't spoil it for you to list those names that were forbidden in russia at the time...while others...who toed the party line, were at the forefront, dry boolsheet of the purest ray serene, sounds like...as nastenka wants to opens the eyes of her students...curious stuff here.
i'll call it what it is: fashionable ideology...and...i cannot state clearly what i thought i saw, yay ago...a year? more? less?...i dunno. not like i keep a record of this boolsheet of the purest ray serene...but it was a call for homosexual literature...send in your gay stories...yay! boy howdy! more cock-sucking and butt-focking! eating that lesbian stew! anal tongue darts! it's the fashion! call one! call all! okay, so the basic chant was a call for gay stories. like i said, fashionable ideology. they didn't write the story...the story wrote them.
story 5: "adlig schwenkitten"
subtitled a tale of twenty-four hours"
dedicated to the memory of major pavel afanasyevich boyev and
major vladimir kondratyevich baluev
begins:
on the night of january 25-26, the army artillery staff informed the staff of our artillery brigade that our forward tank corps had broken through to the baltic coast! east prussia, therefore, had been cut off from germany.
so this is a story of the world war...i assume the 2nd...and...the one that follows is another, has some of the same characters. this artillery outfit is alone...waiting for infantry...setting up. people die. some survive.
story 6: "zhelyabuga village"
three days ago out troops moved through the breach on the river neruch. for these past days, my central station has been located inside a smokestack by the railway embankment. the brickwork was solid and gave good protection from enemy shelling. some peasant women with their little ones had crowded in with us, and a couple of dozen gypsies who had popped up from somewhere had also settle in...
like i said, this one too, about the world war. solzhenitsyn goes into some detail about this artillery outfit..."a sound-ranging battery"...interesting to me, navy-time, ngfs...naval gun-fire support...so i'm a bit familiar with the...logistics...the math involved...yeah so like he goes into detail about stringing out lines to the various posts, connected to the "central station" where they plot targets based on the info they can gather.
i'm reminded of our lone 5-inch gun on the fo'c'sle...the barrel rising and falling w/the movement of the sea...how things have changed...how efficient we are. heh.
then...the story takes a great leap forward...time...and some of the old-timers have a kind of reunion...they go to this place...there is an old woman there, wrinkled...there are many old women there...they set up a skirmish line, not allowing these men...and the yucky-yuck with them...to leave...not until they get some word of bread. they want bread. they expect bread. they cannot live without bread. they are promised more...yes, it is agreed...there should be bread...
i imagine the two ideas...the detail about the artillery, the need, the desire for accuracy, for information...and then the old women, i imagine those two ideas are juxtaposed for a reason. enough said.
story 7: "times of crisis"
yorka zhukov, born into a peasant family, could handle a rake at hay cutting when he was seven and helped around the family farm as he got older, though he finished the three-year parish school. then his father sent him all the way to moscow as an errand boy and apprentice to a distant, wealthy relative, a furrier. that's where he grew up, starting as a servant, running errands and working bit by bit until his mastered the furrier's trade.
..."but the german war broke out, and in 1915..."
so sounds like this one is about the world war...the 1st perhaps...were the previous 2 about the 1st, as well? no...seems in one of them i read about the finnish war, too...a character who had seen it all, etc.
follows the life of zhukov...the war years...the ups & downs of communicating w/stalin...changes to 1st person after ten or less pages...back to third after a few...after a mingling of 1st and 2nd...all this intrigue and plotting, conniving and scheming. i wonder if any were immune to it? go elsewhere for a time and discover your position has been eliminated. heh!
and too, when he begins to write his memoirs, there is present the 'writers block' that dictates yes no maybe...me too...like the song? everyday people?...like that...the story provides the impression...as it starts...that zhukov...is everyday people, above the fray...anyway...onward upward
story 8: "fracture points"
who didn't go hungry that year? though his father was a shop foreman, he never "picked up" anything extra and never allowed anyone else to do so. in the family were his mother, grandmother, sister, and mitya, almost seventeen, and all of them so hungry! he would stand by his lathe all day and then at night it was off in a boat with a friend to catch some fish.
story 9: "no matter what"
supper for the reserve regiment was served at six in the evening, even though lights-out did not come until ten. someone had correctly figured that the men would get by without any more food that way, and would sleep through until morning.
midway...the timeline advances to...what? 'present'-day? perhaps. even then, food is a problem...bread...bread bread. all will proceed according to plan.
a sense of a people and place struggling toward...what? modernity?...toward bread...barely making it. the old, the new...or new ways of management...none of which seem to be the solution and so it goes...all will proceed according to plan.
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