Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978

By turns revealing and turgid, this first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs (the second will cover 1978 to 1994) recounts the 1970 Nobel Prize winner’s efforts to create a life after being expelled from the Soviet Union following publication in France of The Gulag Archipelago. He initially went to Zurich, where he was quickly beset by many worries: could his archive be rescued? Would he be able to write? In 1977, he and his family settled on heavily wooded property in Cavendish, Vt., in the hopes that he could concentrate on his history of the Russian Revolution. Even so, he complained that, having escaped the familiar burden of KGB harassment, he now felt pressured by “a second millstone, the millstone of the West.” Throughout the text, he shares a litany of complaints—responding to a continual deluge of mail takes away his time for writing, unscrupulous literary agents and publishers exploit him, and the American press mischaracterizes him, particularly after his controversial 1978 Harvard commencement address about a “weakening of character in the West.” Solzhenitsyn’s memoir will intrigue some with its glimpses into the everyday life of a onetime giant in the world of letters, but will strike most as ponderous. [em](Oct.) [/em]