  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn cover art  Apricot Jam and Other
Stories  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  (Counterpoint; US: Sep 2011)
Once you inhabit a world in which the regime dictates movements
and feelings and politicises thought and action, then the moral
landscape is utterly ambiguous and the concept of personal
responsibility can be lost. The warm, jewel-like hue of
something as simple as apricot jam becomes a fetish object to
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in this context, epitomizing all the
desire and appetite in life for sweetness, succulence, plenty;
in other words what was missing under Soviet rule.  Indeed,
simplicity, sweetness, warmth, and satisfaction are qualities
and states of being that all the characters in this collection
of short stories manage to lose and sadly for most of them,
never regain.  These stories are written in a ‘binary’ mode, as
Solzhenitsyn termed it. That is, he juxtaposed and paired
contrasting narratives, characters with the same name, and
Revolutionary and post-Soviet tales. It’s not a r