BOOKS
155
contammg 105 stories, with a flyleaf injunction that "this Samizdat
collection is published without the author's knowledge and consent."
The experience the stories convey leaves Solzhenitsyn far behind.
Besides being an important link in the vast prison literature harking
back to Dostoyevsky, the stories are bound to stand on their own as a
major social document. Technically they can be described as
Chekhovian, plunging the reader into an immediate situation, intro–
ducing the characters with a few brief strokes, and ending with a
sharp twist. But the experience is so condensed and palpable, and
the force of each deadpan ending is so great that it feels like a severe
blow. Reading the whole book through is an endurance test. You
learn in passing that it is forty-five below zero when the spit freezes
in mid-air, that the lice begin to move on your skin when you enter a
heated room, that it is impossible to avert one's gaze from a person
who has a piece of bread in his mouth, that the same frost that
transforms the spit also penetrates the soul.
A mercifully short seletion of these stories has just been trans–
lated by John Glad . His translations are accurate and forceful, and
the foreword supplies some useful information and observations. He
selected for his translation 22 stories which he "literally felt
compelled to see appear," and grouped them under the headings of
"Survival," "Hope," "Defiance," "The Criminal World," and "The
Jailors' World." This arrangement is in itself an imaginative contri–
bution by John Glad: it helps the reader organize his experience of
the stories to find, within the horror, the redeeming grace that
compels one to go on reading, and to establish the borderline
between the utter inhumanity of the criminal world and the human
decency which miraculously survives. The choice of a story to open
his selection is characteristic of John Glad's creative approach . "Of
all the northern trees I loved the dwarf cedar most of all ." This state–
ment opens a page oflyrical description preceding a grim story . So it
happens that the eternity of nature, the silence of the taiga, and the
image of the valiant northern tree, the symbol of endurance and
recuperation, come alive in the reader's imagination at the outset
and linger in his mind when the book is closed.
ELENA LEVIN
