The Oak and the Calf is not fiction; it is a political diary and must be judged on its politics. If Solzhenitsyn sees himself as the calf butting and uprooting the Soviet oak, well, fine, but why then is he so endlessly surprised that during all those years the publishing apparatchiks were less than fond of him?… Why does he not show more sympathy, or maybe even some guilt, toward Tvardovsky of Novy Mir who, though a party member, stuck out his neck for him and in the process lost first his magazine, then, from sorrow, his life, and who is perhaps the real hero of this book?

It will be answered that Solzhenitsyn was consciously but secretly at war with the Soviet establishment, and that in this unequal struggle he was entitled to any and every subterfuge and tactic.

An acceptable postulate. But what does not seem...