SOURCE: "Short Stories," Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Twayne Publishers, 1978, pp. 104-22.

In the following excerpt, Kodjak offers a survey of theme and plot in Solzhenitsyn's short fiction.

Solzhenitsyn's short stories and novels written roughly over the same years are closely linked with one another philosophically. There is, however, a significant difference between the three novels and the short stories. At least two of the novels deal directly with prison life, and the third, The Cancer Ward, alludes to it through the figure of Oleg Kostoglotov; in his short stories Solzhenitsyn does not concern himself with this feature of society. There he seems rather to be attempting to break out of the context of forced confinement in order to project his ideas and philosophy in a more familiar setting. And yet even Solzhenitsyn's short stories do not omit the experience of the zek altogether. "Matryonin Dvor" ("Matryona's House") and "Pravaya Kist'...