After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking stories--interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as "binary"--join Solzhenitsyn's already available work as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century.

Written "in bracing prose, eschewing artifice" (Financial Times) with Soviet and post-Soviet life as their focus, these stories weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In "The Upcoming Generation," a professor 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. In "Nastenka," two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives--until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both.

"A haunting meditation on [Solzenhitsyn's] lifetime's dominant theme . . . Solzhenitsyn writes

"The best stories in this collection stand among Solzhenitsyn's best work, and present a depth seldom found in the short story form." --Full-Stop.net

"Via fiction he interrogates history, and reveals truth." --RIA Novosti