Clayton Trutor Reviews BTM-2

Clayton Trutor reviews BTM-2 in The American Spectator.

“In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn settled into a writerly life of unprecedented focus, four years removed from his expulsion from the Soviet Union. In this second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s exile memoirs, he covers the decade-and-a-half between his iconoclastic Harvard commencement address and his return to Russia. This long-awaited translation does not disappoint, offering insights into his work on The Red Wheel, his family life in Vermont, and his responses to the rapidly evolving political circumstances of what proved to be Soviet Communism’s waning years. The tone of Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994 is significantly different from his previous memoirs. The first volume of Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978, is a fast-moving narrative focused on the author’s expulsion, seclusion, and subsequent international stardom. The Oak and the Calf, published in the West soon after his 1974 expulsion, details Solzhenitsyn’s struggles with the Soviet state. Book 2 is, to a much greater extent, a story about the practice of everyday life.”