BRATTLEBORO — In anticipation of the Feb. 5 First Wednesday Lecture at Brooks Memorial Library by Ignat Solzhenitsyn - son of the 1970 Nobel Prize-winning and Soviet-era dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - join Vermont Humanities scholar Richard Wizansky for a reading and discussion series, beginning on Thursday, Jan. 9, in the Brooks Memorial Library Meeting Room.
On Feb. 5, conductor and pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn recollects his father's painstaking crafting of “The Red Wheel” - a history of the Russian Revolution - and his family's life in Cavendish in the 1980s.
This series will feature the shorter works by the great Russian writer, as well as several of his famous speeches. Readings are available at the main circulation desk. All discussions begin at 4 p.m.
• Thursday, Jan. 9, “Matryona's Place,” written in 1959, is a novella generally ranked among the author's finest literary achievements.
• Thursday, Jan. 16, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962), a story set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, describes a day in the life of an ordinary prisoner. The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, as never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed.
• Thursday, Feb. 13, Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Lecture and his 1978 Harvard Class Day address.