SOURCE: "Exit, Pursued by a Bear," in The New York Times Book Review, December 11, 1983, p. 11.

In the following review, Gold lauds The Island of Crimea, praising Aksyonov's skill as a novelist.

I remember my relief as a young man to discover that the apparently monstrous mass of Greenland in the atlas is a necessary map maker's illusion, that while it is "the largest island in the world," Greenland is not, in fact, the approximate size of four Australias or capable of entirely covering the North American continent, which it abuts. But so far as I know, no one has yet blown the whistle on Rand McNally for its Soviet Union, which lumbers into the picture from the west (with all of Asia clinging to its underbelly) like an obese dragon, snaps hungrily at Alaska and, after the comparatively small interval of Canada and the North Atlantic, shambles off...