Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
God and the Devil
By John Bayley
August 1914: The Red Wheel/Knot I
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 854 pp., $19.95 (paper)
It has become the fashion to write off Solzhenitsyn as a has-been, an old fuddy-duddy, still lamenting in voluminous pages at longer and longer intervals the disappearance of Holy Russia, and castigating now not so much the Soviet regime as the new-style Russian intelligentsia, both those in exile and those still in their own homeland. Intellectuals like Andrei Sinyavsky, who used to smuggle his books out to the West to be published under the nom de plume of Abram Tertz, make no secret of the fact that they find Solzhenitsyn's attitudes and personality decidedly uncongenial, even though they admire his past work, and particularly his first short, brilliant tale from the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Review, 2804 words
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