SOURCE: "Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Impending Event: An Added Dimension to Solve an Old Problem," in Cimarron Review, No. 13, October, 1970, pp. 16-23.

In the following essay, Clardy studies the importance of the "impending event" as a device used to maintain interest in Solzhenitsyn's narratives about "the revelation of character, " including "Matryona's Home," the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and the novel The Cancer Ward.

Any writer who deals mainly with the revelation of character is apt to have trouble making his stories interesting to the reader. Even in the hands of a master, this type of fiction can earn the author the label of being "dull." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, considered by some critics to be the Soviet Union's most outstanding novelist and short story writer of the post-Stalin period, is the practitioner of such a form of writing. Like Anton Chekhov, he is more interested...