Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
On the Western Front
By Helen Muchnic
Prussian Nights: A Poem
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by Robert Conquest
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 113 pp., $2.95 (paper)
To Be Preserved Forever
by Lev Kopelev, translated and edited by Anthony Austin
Lippincott, 268 pp., $12.50
In 1941, directly after his graduation from the University of Rostov, Solzhenitsyn entered the army and spent four years at the front. He was awarded two decorations and the rank of captain. In January 1945 he commanded an 'observation battery' in the East Prussian campaign, at the end of which, in early February, he was arrested as a political criminal on the evidence of unflattering remarks he had made about Stalin and Soviet literature in letters to a friend. During the next twelve years, he endured interrogations, prisons, labor camp, and exile, and was 'rehabilitated' in 1951. He was 'discovered' as a literary artist in 1962 with the publication in Novy mir of his momentous One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Review, 3029 words
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