One of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is best known for such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. His works are widely read and studied today, and he has received much biographical and critical attention. Like many other writers of enduring literature, he engages timeless moral and theological issues. His writings and ideas are complex and reflect the swirling political and intellectual controversies of his time. This encyclopedia is a convenient and comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Through more than 200 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference details his life and career. Each of his fictional works is discussed, as are his major pieces of journalism. There are also entries for his family members, close friends and associates, places where he lived, literary movements with which he is associated, and journals or newspapers in which he published. Also included are entries for major writers and thinkers who influenced his works, and for ideas and themes that figure prominently in his writings. The entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of major works.

In this, his atmospheric final work of fiction, the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich introduces an unforgettable set of characters whose day-to-day lives are transformed under the pressures of Soviet rule. These stories confirm Solzhenitsyn's position alongside Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol as one of Russia's great writers.

After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking works--interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as binary--join Solzhenitsyn's already available fiction as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century. With Soviet and post-Soviety life as their focus, these stories weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In The Upcoming Generation, a professor promotes a dull but proletarian 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. The most eloquent and acclaimed opponent of government oppression, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and his work continues to receive international acclaim. Available for the first time in English, Apricot Jam and Other Stories is a striking example of Solzhenitsyn's singular style and only further solidifies his place as a true literary giant.