Word: oaks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...OAK AND THE CALF by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Translated by Harry Willetts; Harper & Row; 568 pages...
Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, poet, historian of the Gulag and indefatigable polemicist-these are the various vocations that Alexander Solzhenitsyn has long pursued. Now, with the publication of The Oak and the Calf, yet another Solzhenitsyn has emerged: military strategist. This memoir reveals the embattled Russian writer as the master planner of his own personal twelve-year war with the Soviet regime. Few readers of his chronicle of combat will fail to be impressed by the bold forays and feints, the diversionary actions and tactical retreats that ultimately won Solzhenitsyn an unconditional victory, albeit only a moral...
...with the publication of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on Khrushchev's orders, and ending with his deportation from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn, whose creative energies seem to flourish in adversity, was in top form when he wrote The Oak during the years 1967-73; only the climactic chapter, footnotes and appendixes have been added in exile. The force of his narrative, the drama of unfolding historical events and the density of supporting detail combine to make The Oak one of the author's most engrossing books...
...other means. Though under surveillance and in constant danger of arrest or assassination, he contrived a kind of literary Dunkirk. He smuggled out to the West every one of his divisions and army corps. These had now grown in force and number to include the monumental Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf and August 1914. He gave instructions that vest-pocket editions of his books be printed in Russian on Bible paper by his Paris publisher for more convenient smuggling to the Soviet Union. At the same time, foreign short-wave stations were regularly broad casting readings from...
...original Russian title of Solzhenitsyn's memoir is The Calf Kept Butting the Oak. The English equivalent of this Russian proverbial saying is "beating one's head against a stone wall." Russia is a land of proverbs. One that could apply to all of Solzhenitsyn's writings: "What has been written with a pen cannot be hacked away with an ax " - Patricia Blake