Customer Reviews

We Never Make Mistakes: Two Short Novels

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These two great stories are written in that harsh realistic style so charateristic of Solzhenitsyn's works. Both stories are important on two fronts: They are both allow for primary-source insight into what many Westerners have a skewed perception of (the poverty and oppression in Stalanist Russia), and secondly, both stories present severe criticsm of human nature in such grand metaphoric form as to allow them to penetrate the reader's own soul. The phrase "thought provoking," does these stories no justice, the parables are better described as painfully applicable.

Two powerful short stories...One about war injustice and unfair system that treats people based on suspicion that has no real roots...The red army lieutenant, Zotov,sends a straggler to miserable fate just because the guy didn't know what the Stalingrad previous name was?...The one answer he received upon inquiring of the guy's fate was"don't worry we'll take care of your Tveritinov,We never make mistakes"...

the second novella is the tale of Matryona;an old poor peasant widow,narrated by her roomate; she helps everybody for free and dies in misery because of the greed of her relatives who complained after her death that "she never accumulated property against the time of her death"...

those were written beautifully similar to his magnificent novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"..