SOURCE: "Genesis: Prose Poems and Stories" and "History Recovered," in Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 18-33; 115-45.

In the following excerpt, Ericson studies the developing themes in Solzhenitsyn's early prose poems and stories and examines the novella Lenin in Zurich as a political work intended to demythologize the Russian leader.

Solzhenitsyn had done some writing during both World War II and his imprisonment thereafter. We cannot be sure how much of this work, probably mostly poetry, he committed to memory before he felt it necessary, for safety's sake, to destroy the manuscripts. His narrative poem Prussian Nights is an example of a work originally composed early in his career. What we can be sure of is that shortly after the end of his years of incarceration he had penned a handful of stories and a series of brief vignettes, or meditations—prose poems...