Books by Francis Barker
Solzhenitsyn
by Francis Barker
This is a book hostile to Solzhenitsyn, an unashamedly Marxist critique of him. It is an intelligent, book, though one I happen to disagree with, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a good example of the confusion that has been sewn by the sequence of publication of Solzhenitsyn’s work in the West. If I survive to finish the book I have started, it will be on Solzhenitsyn before Ivan Denisovich and will aim to correct some of those errors. Barker’s view is that Solzhenitsyn began with this lean, democratic and open short work, Ivan Denisovich, and went on to write books that became ever longer, more dogmatic, nationalistic, mystical, and irrelevant – that he became a worse and worse writer throughout his career. But, in fact, he made his first attempt to write Gulag Archipelago in 1958, before he had written a word of Ivan Denisovich.
Interviews where books by Francis Barker were recommended
The Best Books About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, recommended by Michael Nicholson
Russian literature specialist Michael Nicholson, Emeritus Fellow at University College, Oxford, talks us through the best books to learn more about the great Soviet dissident and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
