Customer Reviews

Stories & Prose Poems

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Reading some of the lukewarm responses to this work from the two reviewers who posted before me, I'm inspired to add my two cents worth. I find what I've read so far in this collection - "Matronya's House", "For the Good of the Cause", "The Easter Procession", "Zakhar-the-Pouch", and "The Right Hand" - to be fantastic short fiction, powerfully felt and heard with the inner ear that Nabokov urges you to use when you read. I left work last week in a good mood, completed "For the Good of the Cause" on the 45-minute train ride home, and was downright bleak as a I walked in the front door. I'm not saying it's good to be down, but a story that can have such an impact that it actually changes your mood has to be tapping into a truly artistic vein. So I'm just going to be a voice here on this forum saying that Solzhenitsyn can really really write, and these stories range from very good to great.

That this book was published in the early 1970s is no accident. It was at this time that Solzhenitsyn was at the height of his influence and virtually any scrap of nonsense he managed to get to a publishing house would be ravenously devoured and shat out in cloth and paper post-haste. That's why you can find a million used copies of the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago but hardly any of the second or the third. It's not to say that Solzhenitsyn is a bad writer- he's very good- but he was beholden entirely to the Western audience that never understood him except in the crudest sense and would buy anything he wrote simply because his name was on it.

It's a shame that this book was published under such shady circumstances and without the prudent editing which would have been involved in a normal release, because some of the material here is quite good. Matronya's house is a charming provincial fable about the necessity of sacrifice, hard work and steely moral discipline to preserving civilization. The Right Hand is simultaneously tiny slice of Cancer Ward and a bitter rebuke of those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. For the Good of the Cause is a tale drawn from his days as a teacher and Incident at Keretchkova (I'm positive I misspelled that) Station is a story of wartime Russia and the chaos, confusion, distrust and anger which engulfed it during the most hopeless moments of the German onslaught.

Everything else is either middling or worthless. His maudlin Easter Procession is Solzhenitsyn's stubborn orthodoxy and mystic spirituality at its most unbearably preachy and every single one of the prose poems should have been sliced out and left for his Collected Works. Still, the book is cheap and if you're looking for a more nuanced portrait of Solzhenitsyn the man and less Solzhenitsyn the prisoner it can hardly hurt to pick it up.