The Oak And The Calf

Download or read book Between Two Millstones, Book 1 written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.

Download or read book The Oak and the Calf written by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1981 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fragment about the author's life describes the repression of ideas in the Soviet Union during the 1960s.

Download or read book Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and Novy Mir written by Vladimir Lakshin and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1982-04-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lakshin's book ... is also in its own way an interesting depiction of the life of Moscow's literary bureaucracy, a picture very different from the one Solzhenitsyn draws in 'The Oak and the Calf.'"- Sidney Monas, The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Between Two Millstones, Book 2 written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” —Kirkus Reviews This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away—the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other. Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too—the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

Download or read book Lazy B written by Sandra Day O'Connor and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of Sandra Day O’Connor’s family and early life, her journey to adulthood in the American Southwest that helped make her the woman she is today: the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and one of the most powerful women in America. “A charming memoir about growing up as sturdy cowboys and cowgirls in a time now past.”—USA Today In this illuminating and unusual book, Sandra Day O’Connor tells, with her brother, Alan, the story of the Day family, and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B ranch in Arizona. Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America.

Download or read book Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today written by Peter Augustine Lawler and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics. These tensions are explored through the works of such eminent thinkers as Aristotle, Augustine, and Tocqueville, but the contributors engage a wide variety of texts from popular culture, American literature--Flannery O'Connor receives notable attention--and social theory to create a remarkably comprehensive, if far from harmonious, introduction to political philosphy today.

Download or read book The First Circle written by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician, lives out his life in post-war Russia in a series of prisons and labor camps where he and his fellow inmates work to meet the demands of Stalin.