many years ago, when it was first published in paperback in the U.S. Now I've read that volume again, and find to my amazement that there are two more, each as large as the first. Solzhenitsyn, I find, is a bit like Wagner or Proust: one has a richer experience the second time around, when one has a better notion of what to expect. Here he is on the subject of western liberals, as seen by a slave laborer after a rainy day trying to meet the quota the clay pits on a starvation diet:"Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne or Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student cafes.... They railed against their own governments and their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union.... They judged everything in the world with self-assurance, but particularly the prosperity and higher justice of our country....
"The rain drummed on the back of our heads, and the chill crept up our wet backs." (Harper & Row 1976, vol. 2, pp. 195-196)
Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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