Volume 27, Number 11 · June 26, 1980
The Two Solzhenitsyns
By John Bayley
The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry Willetts
Harper & Row, 568 pp., $15.95
'I am a littérateur,' wrote Belinsky. 'I say this with a painful and yet proud and happy feeling. Russian literature is in my life and blood.' Many other Russian writers could say the same, and Solzhenitsyn above all. He belongs wholly to the committed tradition of Russian literature, which Belinsky inspired, and which regarded writing as the lifeblood of ideas, progress, social truth. Belinsky detested art with a conscious social purpose, just because it was conscious: for him good art was the natural, the inevitable, the only weapon in the struggle for truth and justice, and he revered Pushkin and Turgenev as great artists who could not help but light up the human condition and banish the repulsive gloom of tyranny, hypocrisy, and superstition.
Review, 3752 words
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