Volume 3, Number 3 · September 24, 1964
Bread and Kvass
By Al Alvarez
For the Good of the Cause
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Praeger, 151 pp., $3.95
We Never Make Mistakes
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
University of South Carolina, 100 pp., $3.75
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is, I believe, the only contemporary Soviet novelist whose total published work—at least up until the end of 1963—has been translated into English. This is something to be grateful for, since Solzhenitsyn is a good, sometimes excellent, writer. But there is no point in pretending that it is his literary quality which promotes such enthusiasm for his writing in the West. Like his less talented colleague Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn is another of those aesthetic barometers the experts use to forecast the political weather in the Soviet Union; by what he publishes and how it is received they can tell whether the skies are set fair for a liberal spell, or a repressive storm is looming.
Review, 1779 words
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