SOURCE: "Solzhenitsyn's Four Stories," in Soviet Studies, Vol. XVI, No. 1, July, 1964, pp. 45-62.

In the following essay, Zekulin evaluates several of Solzhenitsyn's stories that deal with the fate of the Russian peasantry and intelligentsia in the Soviet era, arguing that these works derive from a vital nineteenth-century tradition of critical realism in Russian literature.

It is little over a year since A. Solzhenitsyn's first story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich¹ was published in the Soviet Union. It made history there² and, for a time, became the most discussed book in the west as well.³ This interest, both in the USSR and the west, was mainly 'sensational' and due to the exposure of what Tvardovski in his foreword calls euphemistically 'the unhealthy symptoms in our development which are linked with the period of the personality cult'. The literary value of the story was discussed very little...