Solzhenitsyn’s Linguistic Mastery as Challenge to the Translator: On the Novel In the First Circle

This course will focus on the linguistic features of Solzhenitsyn’s novel and the background knowledge that a reader should possess in order to adequately comprehend the novel’s text. This includes knowledge stemming from the implicit elements of meaning in the employed linguistic units, as well as aspects of Russian culture and Soviet life in the 1950s with which the reader is expected to be familiar. The “full” text of the novel will be analyzed (all 96 chapters; the original text, which brought the writer global renown, consisted of 87 chapters and told a different narrative). We will examine the question of why the novel is difficult to translate and how to overcome these difficulties