Customer Reviews

Stories and Prose Poems

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Solzhenitsyn is one of mankind's greatest writers. His 'Gulag Archipelago' is a most powerful work of witnessing which opened to the world the long dark night of the Soviet prison world. In that work he recorded the story of thousands of witnesses, allowed them to speak in their own voices. In this collection of stories and prose poems Solzhenitsyn is not always at his best. But in one story, the opening autobiographical story he tells of his life in a remote central Asian village where he boarded with a peasant woman Maryousha who in her humility is taken by him to be a kind of saint. His depiction of the poverty cruelty and greed of this world is Chekhovian .

In other stories Solzhenitsyn tells of the corruption of Soviet bureaucracy, and the distance the people seem to be from true religious life.

His love of and search for the true Russia is an implicit theme of the work.

It would have been helpful to have some kind of introduction to the work, some explanation of where the individual pieces stand in relation to Solzhenitsyn's work as a whole.