Apricot Jam and Other Stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Description

Apricot Jam and Other Stories is a collection of eight short stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published in 1994. The stories are all set in the Soviet Union, and they explore the themes of love, loss, redemption, and the human spirit in the face of oppression.

The stories are paired together in a way that Solzhenitsyn called “binary,” meaning that they are interconnected and juxtaposed in order to create a richer and more complex understanding of the human experience. For example, the story “The Upcoming Generation” is about a professor who 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.