Welcome to our Book Club!
Book Club meetings are held via Zoom on the last Thursday evening of odd-numbered months beginning at 7:00 p.m. (Portland time). The focus for 2024 is 20th-century Russian classics, with reading selections determined by participant consensus. At present we’re reading two novels concurrently, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (only180 pages) and Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (all of 580 pages)—Ivan Denisovich to be discussed on September 26th, Quiet Don on November 21st. (The last Thursday in November is Thanksgiving, so the meeting date is switched to the 21st.) Participants have made the decision to devote a portion of the September 26th meeting to finishing up discussion of our previous reading selection, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. (Note that all three of these selections are by Nobel Prize winners, though Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were prohibited from accepting their awards.) The Zoom meeting links for the Ivan Denisovich and Quiet Don discussions, as well as a link to “Discussion Questions” (courtesy of Book Club Coordinator & Facilitator Alan Ellis) are posted below. Come join in on the conversation & analysis! (Давайтe вместе почитаем и поговорим!)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Александр Исаевич Солженицын) and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (Михаил Александрович Шолохов) were both born in turbulent revolutionary times—Sholokhov in 1905, Solzhenitsyn in 1918—and both were raised in the south of Russia—Sholokhov in a Cossack village in the Don region, Solzhenitsyn in the northern foothills of the Caucasus region. Both began their writing careers as teenagers—Sholokhov on his epic about the Don Cossacks (And Quite Flows the Don—Тихий Дон), Solzhenitsyn on his epic about WWI and the Russian Revolution (August, 1914). Patriotically embracing Marxism-Leninism in their youth, both served in the Red Army—Sholokhov during the Red/White Civil War, Solzhenitsyn during WWII. But their lives took decidedly different paths in adulthood— Solzhenitsyn arrested for writing derogatory comments about Stalin’s conduct of the war,
Sholokhov winning the Stalin Prize and the Nobel Prize (principally for the writing of And Quite Flows the Don, which became the most widely read novel in the USSR for decades). Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—Один день Ивана Денисовича), based the author’s eight years in the GULAG, was made possible by Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin “Thaw” in literary censorship. But following Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964, Solzhenitsyn was publicly denounced, expelled from the Union of Writers, and eventually deported. Sholokhov had his share of controversy as well, accused of plagiarism with claims that Quiet Don was a reworking of a decades-old manuscript by author Fyodor Kryukov and boldly confronting Stalin in defense of Don region compatriots. Enigmatic to the end, Solzhenitsyn denounced Soviet Communism and applauded political liberty, while also vilifying Western “liberalism” (e.g., secularism, pop culture, women’s liberation), assailing Yeltsin’s “democracy” …and lauding Putin’s values. Sholokhov died in 1984 at age 78, Solzhenitsyn in 2008 at age 89.
ABOUT THE NOVELS
The publishing of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was an extraordinary event, since never before had an acccount of Stalinist repressions been openly distributed in the Soviet Union. The novella’s protagonist is Ivan Denisdovich Shukhov, sentenced to the GULAG on a specious charge of spying after being captured briefly as a prisoner of war during WWII. The story is an account of one harrowing day of Shukhov’s 3,653-day sentence. Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don is a dramatic protrayal of the heroic and tragic struggle of the Don River Cossacks during a tempestuous era of crisis in which the novel’s troubled protagonist, Grigory Melekhov, changes sides four times in the Red/White Civil War (indifferent in the end). Cossack culture is explored through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses. Majestic landscape serves as backdrop.
Click on the meeting dates below to join!
