Apricot Jam and Other Stories
APRICOT JAM AND OTHER STORIES presents a series of astonishing portraits of a Soviet and Russian life across the twentieth century. In 'The New Generation', a professor promotes a student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In 'Nastenka', two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives - until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both. 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.
3.4 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
|
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0857863188 |
| Publisher |
Canongate Books Ltd |
| |
APRICOT JAM AND OTHER STORIES presents a series of astonishing portraits of a Soviet and Russian life across the twentieth century. In 'The New Generation', a professor promotes a student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In 'Nastenka', two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives - until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both. 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.
Reviews
The Guardian
Michael Nicholson
“They are the works of a writer with few equals for his industry, capacious memory and the passion of his convictions (from the Leninist ardour of his adolescence to the anti-Soviet patriotism of later years). Within them resonate not only the repatriated writer's fear for and repulsion at the new Russia, but many echoes of a life which spanned wartime service in the artillery, eight years as an inmate of the Gulag Archipelago, prolonged treatment for "terminal" cancer, and years of seditious underground writing ...”
04/11/2011
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The New Statesman
Adam Kirsch
“With its unapologetic moralising and blunt irony, Apricot Jam is a perfect introduction to the stories in this volume ... Literary men, in his experience, were too often on the "winning" side of this struggle, enjoying privileges - literally eating their apricot jam - while the common people suffered. Thus, the way for literature to redeem itself was not to preserve inwardness and aesthetic delicacy, but to commit to the struggle for justice: to document abuses and honour expressions of comradeship and sacrifice. Those themes are hammered home in Apricot Jam.”
31/10/2011
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The Times
Orlando Figes
“In his only major work, Two Hundred Years Together, he explored the history of Jewish-Russian relations in a clumsy manner, which exposed him unfairly to accusations of anti-Semitism. What got forgotten was how great a writer Solzhenitsyn was. But now we are reminded with these nine short stories written shortly after his return to Russia and published posthumously — all but one for the first time in English — in an excellent translation by Kenneth Lantz and Stephan Solzhenitsyn, the author’s son.”
29/10/2011
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The Financial Times
John Thornhill
“As ever, Solzhenitsyn writes in bracing prose, eschewing artifice. But he would not be Russian if he were not on occasion capable of crafting an arresting simile. “The Critic shrank like a mushroom near a flame,” is one that could have been lifted from the pages of Chekhov.”
09/12/2011
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The Literary Review
Anna Aslanyan
“While most of his works are inseparable from his political stance, in these mature stories he never expresses his opinion – just observes, usually from different angles, without siding with anyone, providing an unbiased witness account. Instead of proselytising, he lets events speak for themselves, which is often the only way to catch that evasive truth.”
01/12/2011
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The Sunday Times
Victor Sebestyen
“This book must come with a warning. Anyone coming fresh to Solzhenitsyn’s fiction might wonder what all the fuss was about, and ask how he could (rightly) be compared with the Russian pantheon — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Grossman. On the whole, it is not his best work. True, the stories were written in the 1990s when he was in his seventies and starting to ail physically and, some would say, mentally. But the younger, vigorous Solzhenitsyn would have edited many of these pieces more ruthlessly.”
30/10/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Oliver Bullough
“It is his time in the army that informs the best stories in this collection … Sadly, the non-war stories are crude near-caricatures with a nasty tinge of xenophobia – oppressors have Jewish names, a crooked businessman is a Muslim – and do nothing to further his reputation. Still, the moments of greatness that remain are worth seeking out.”
14/11/2011
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
“A posthumous collection of rather hefty, lumpen chronicles written in the 1990s – I say "chronicles" rather than "stories" because there's so little sign of the ruthless shaping the short form requires. ”
04/12/2011
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