In a small world, Solzhenitsyn sometimes appears too tall. I would not want to meet the striding Armageddon on the road, glowing as I imagine him to be with eschatological fires and accompanied by menacing dogs. Still, he is a great writer with great themes. The conditions of the retrograde Soviet Union, bad for the living writer, offer, in his case at least, a perverse propitiousness for the writing. There the world is, if nothing else, a structure.

I read again … two works. One fairly short, the beautiful story "Matronya's House" and the intense, brilliant "Cancer Ward"—a true novel, passionate, deep, in which the sufferings of the body and the punishment of the soul, the pain of private life and the diseases of political force are bound together by the knots of fate. An old-fashioned work of art, ruthlessly contemporary.

And all the others—the pyramids he...