The Oak and the Calf

It is an interesting story. (If you've never read it, it is not a novel but a memoir of the years he was a famous writer and dissident in the USSR, basically from the time Ivan Denisovich was prepared for publishing until he was expelled in 1974. I find myself thinking as some critics say, that AIS sounds too proud of himself in parts. As I said earlier, I'm not sure why recounting Tvardovsky's alcoholism needed to be in this story. (Tvardovsky was the magazine editor who decided to publish Ivan Denisovich). Although perhaps Solzhenitsyn wanted to portray Tvardovsky as a tragedy, the man for years edited the best (most truthful) magazine in the USSR, but had to make so many compromises with the authorities, and I think Solzhenitsyn wants us to see it was those compromises that drove him to drink.

And as I worried that he had been to proud, I was relieved to find this quote in his description of what he did when he found out about winning the Nobel prize.
"Perhaps in Saratov or Irkutsk our next Nobel Prize winner was writhing in shame for that wretched Solzhenitsyn. Why doesn't he bellow like a calving cow? Why doesn't he get out there and do a bit of tub thumping?"

The background of this, when he first heard he had won the Nobel, he told a foreign reporter that if the decision was up to him, he'd go to Sweden for the ceremony, and he was in good health. But in the end he decided not to apply to leave the USSR, because he sensed the Nobel prize organization didn't want him to make a 'political' speech, and he also thought the USSR might well refuse to let him back in, and his first son was just about to be born. So he found himself unable to make the kind of bold statement he as a younger man had wished Pasternak had made.