SOURCE: “Homo Sovieticus,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 15, 1998, p. 8.

In the following review, Chamberlain offers positive assessment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been an outstanding figure of the century, despite current attempts in Moscow to reduce him to a pop icon or dismiss him as a relic. He is not a joke or a legend, but a real, extraordinary man whose fate, as D. M. Thomas shows, reveals complex truths about his country. That alone would earn him a place in the pantheon of Russian writers whose art has been molded by exile, imprisonment and the experience of Russia in turmoil.

In 1945, a complaint about Stalin written in a letter to a friend earned Solzhenitsyn eight years in the labor camps. He captured his camp experience in The Gulag Archipelago, and the directness with which he bears witness to the deprivation and suffering around him...