Collages and Fluctuations: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Modernist (Dis)Engagements

Denials of the material reality of a published, empirical author were a bizarre Cold War topos, of which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a target in 1971: one of the few times that his writerly mission and his oeuvre intersected with the emerging postmodernist strand in Western and Russian culture. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle is a canonical work that is textually fluctuant as well as isochronous, while as refracted in the text, temporality and narrativity converge into an ontological congruity or even sameness. His later prose saw a shift from a vertical, hierarchical relationship between text and reader, to one that is more horizontal and interactive.