Stories And Prose Poems, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One of the qualities of Solzhenitsyn’s writings is that once you read a little bit of his work, which is true of me (reviews forthcoming) one wants to read more of it.  And like many writers who write based on the material they work with and the story they are telling rather than from any sort of preconceived notions of how long that writing should be, his writing varies from the very short to the very long.  Admittedly, his very long works take a long time to get through, and so as someone who like to read and review a lot of books in order to keep the review pipeline going strong, I have a bit of a bias towards his shorter works that are simply easier to get through than his longer works.  But these shorter works are charming and worthwhile enough that they inspire and encourage a reader like myself to read those longer works as time permits, and so I hope to be reading and reviewing a lot more of him in the future.  This is a book that demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s place among the great writers of Russia going back to the Tsarist days, and not only as a writer of the dysfunctionality of the Soviet gulags for which he is best known.

This particular book consists of both stories and prose poems, six of the first and sixteen of the latter, but the variance in length is very great between these works, which total a bit more than 250 pages in all, a third of which is made up of the story “For The Good Of The Cause,” an excellent story that involves the problems a school has in keeping its buildings for its own engineering students in the face of bungling Soviet bureaucracies that give one of the buildings to someone else to use who happens to be well-connected.  A third of the book is taken up as well by the story “An Incident At Krechetovka Station,” where a logistics officer struggles with boredom and feeding refugees and is haunted by the choice he makes to turn in a Russian emigre spy to the authorities.  There are also some stories here like “Matryona’s House,” about the rivalry between people over the ownership of the house of a dying woman, and “The Right Hand,” about the efforts of a dying man to make use of the fear that people have of his title one last time in order to receive medical care in a hospital.  In contrast to this, the prose poems are very short, but they are still lovely, reflecting on the beauty of St. Petersburg (“The City On The Neva”), the difficulty of rural life (“In Yesenin Country”), and a discussion about “The Ashes Of A Poet.”  The prose poems, though, are lovely and have an impressionistic touch.

For the most part, these are not the sorts of works that would have given the author his deserved reputation for being among the greatest writers of the 20th century, Russian or otherwise.  His writing of A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, his multi-volume epic on the Gulag Archipelago, and works like The Cancer Ward and The First Circle are enough for that.  This work, though, demonstrates the ability of the author to observe what is around him and write smaller and shorter works that show admirable skill in characterization and storytelling on a smaller scale.  All of this only makes the author’s writing more accessible to people who may find the length of most of his classic works daunting, and provides a suitable entry into his corpus of writing as a whole.  For those readers who do want to see how the Solzhenitsyn’s skill for observation and reflection and mastery of prose works in shorter fiction and poetry, this book is definitely a worthwhile one to read.