Learning the Cyrillic alphabet

As I've said, I discovered Solzhenitsyn when I was in college. Our university library had most of his books, both in English translation and in Russian. At some point browsing the shelves or the card catalog, I began to think one could figure out the Russian alphabet by comparing "Solzhenitsyn". I'm sure I knew already that "C" stood for "S", since I knew from James Bond movies that "CCCP" was "USSR". And the "o" and the "e" that didn't change were also clues. I'm not sure how I got the idea that "zh" was only one letter in Russian, but that was the only tricky part to figuring out how it works. And then the first name wasn't that hard either -- "x" seemed to be represented by two letters, but then I remembered that it usually wasn't spelled "Alexander" in English but "Aleksandr".

One amusing story, once I had a class that met in one corner of the library (not a common occurrence for an entomology major). Opposite me was a series of volumes in Russian. So I started trying to decode the alphabet. "D", "A", "H", "L". I was awestruck. This must be Dahl's dictionary that Nerzhin and Rubin were so fond of. I was in rapture looking at those books. The woman sitting between me and Dahl's dictionary must have thought I had a crush on her. Of course, I did have a crush on her, and sometimes I was looking at her, not the books, but not all the time.