Overview
The Calf Who Butted the Oak is the definitive version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic memoir of the grotesque fever dream that passed for “literary life” in the Soviet ’60s and ’70s.
Originally appearing in English as The Oak and the Calf, the narrative begins in 1956, when Solzhenitsyn returns to European Russia after eleven years in prison, labor camp, and Kazakhstan exile—years when he could not set any of his writings to paper, only to memory. Now, he once again writes, albeit in secret. Then comes his lucky break: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appears in the November 1962 issue of Novy Mir, and, like a thunderbolt, the truth about the camps bursts out into Soviet print. The writer himself is instantaneously transformed from an unknown provincial math teacher to a worldwide sensation.
The heart of the memoir takes place over the next eleven years: Solzhenitsyn’s quick fall from grace, the ever-increasing boldness of his public statements, his complex relationship with Novy Mir and its editor Tvardovsky, his battle of wits with the Soviet “Dragon,” and the KGB’s dramatic discovery of his manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago, which leads Solzhenitsyn to order its immediate publication in the West, and the Soviet government to arrest and exile him. The book concludes with “Invisibles,” a poignant tribute to 133 named individuals whose bravery and belief in Solzhenitsyn’s cause allowed him—the Calf—to persevere against the Oak of the Soviet regime.
Part memoir, part political thriller, and part cultural history, The Calf Who Butted the Oak: Sketches of a Literary Life is a reflective contemplation of a “happy warrior’s” self-liberation in the face of tyranny.
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