Alexander Solzhenitsyn "Victory Celebrations, Prisoners and The Love-Girl and the Innocent: Three Plays."
In March 1953, seventeen years before he received the Nobel Prize, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ended his term in the criminal Soviet Ekibastuz labor camp with the play "Victory Celebrations," and seven of the twelve scenes of "Prisoners" committed to memory. During his ensuing internal exile, he completed "Prisoners: and started another play, The "Love-Girl and the Innocent." The result is a dramatic trilogy focusing on events of the year 1945: the criminal Soviet-Russian army’s advance into East Prussia and the “repatriation” of former Russian prisoners of war to the Gulag labor camps.
The three plays transmute Solzhenitsyn’s own bitter experience of war and imprisonment.
In "Victory Celebrations" one can recognize the author in Sergei Nerzhin, a captain in a Soviet artillery battalion whose staff improvises a banquet in a captured castle in East Prussia. Celebration turns to conflict when Nerzhin sides with Galina―a Russian emigree whose husband is fighting with the Germans―against Lieutenant Gridnev, an officer in military counter-intelligence who insists Galina is a spy.
"Prisoners"―based in part on Solzhenitsyn’s own initial arrest and captivity―follow a group of political prisoners, including ex-Prisoners of War from the Soviet army―from their arrival in a Soviet prison on the Prussian border through their perfunctory interrogation, trial, and conviction.
Solzhenitsyn’s alter-ego in "The Love-Girl and the Innocent" is Rodion Nemov, a new prisoner in a labor camp who is unwilling to compromise in order to survive. This final play in the trilogy is, as Martin Esslin wrote of the 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “a classic portrayal of the Gulag.”
These plays from the 1950s are among the Nobel laureate’s earlier writings. But in his indignation at injustice and communist Soviet moral bankruptcy, Solzhenitsyn the playwright prefigures Solzhenitsyn the great novelist.
Paperback. First American Edition. 1986.
New book. Very minor shelf wear from rubbing.