Review: The Oak and the Calf: A Memoir

The Oak and the Calf: A Memoir by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is my second reading of this memoir by Solzhenitsyn. I enjoyed it much less than my recollection of my first reading. His path through a censored press to publish his only work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the periodical Novy Mir ends up being a bitchy recollection of how he outsmarted, out-willed, and largely stayed one step ahead of dimension-less bureaucrats. Although we have here a gifted novelist, he seems unable to get past his own crowing to explore contradictory motivations and nuances in the thought processes of his adversaries. This book tells us how his manipulations allowed him to publish in the West Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".[ This book covers how Solzhenitsyn maximized the PR benefit for him while not going Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he would not be allowed to reenter. He was eventually “expatriated” suddenly from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.in 1974. That mysterious plane trip is the most dramatic part of the work here, but still he can’t help but showing off one-upping his minders, such as to peremptorily go to the restroom.

I was hoping to get more about life in the Soviet era and particularly the effects of the state police apparatus. This is covered mostly in their organized phone harassment, but I feel I had a better picture drawn for me in the novels [book:We the Living|668], Darkness at Noon, and even the fanciful 1984.


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