Word: solzhenitsyn
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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...NEVER MAKE MISTAKES," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is the best of the new Russian novelists who have won recognition in the post-Stalin "thaw." These are two short novels about fringe members of Soviet society: the man who still believes in Das Kapital and the poor old peasant woman who has endured both czars and commissars...
This time Solzhenitsyn's subjects are far less provocative - the life and death of an old peasant woman existing on the fringes of Soviet society; an incident between two soldiers in wartime. But in each, not so much from easy political resentment as from a profound accumulation of sorrow, Solzhenitsyn asks questions that challenge the validity of the whole Soviet system...
...regarded him as some kind of nut and sent him back to the university. He is troubled because the war is not following the victorious blueprint that Joseph Stalin always said it would. His only solace is reading Das Kapital. "The worse the news from the war became," writes Solzhenitsyn, "the more he buried himself in this thick blue book...
...Righteous One. Like Solzhenitsyn himself, the narrator of the second story is a former political prisoner and teacher who "wanted to cut myself loose and get lost in the innermost heart of Russia-if there were any such thing." He finds a village and an old woman named Matryona. Slowly sketching her life, Solzhenitsyn presents her as a symbol of ancient Russia, oppressed by czars and commissars alike, but still waiting for fulfillment. "She was considered 'odd' by her sisters," he concludes, "a laughingstock who was so stupid as to work for others without pay. She never accumulated...
...Solzhenitsyn is 45, a schoolteacher, and reported to be suffering from cancer. He is likely to raise a towering voice in the strange and still tormented world of Soviet letters-if he lives and if he is allowed to write. Matryona's House was attacked in Russia on the ground that it suggests the revolution has failed to improve the lot of the peasantry...