Happy 104th birthday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn!

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On the great writer’s 104th birthday, we share with you one of his inimitable Miniatures (aka prose poems), tiny masterpieces that pack so much into so little. Here is “Sharik”:

“A boy in our yard keeps a little dog called Sharik on a chain. They tied him up when he was just a puppy.

One day I took him some chicken bones while they were warm and smelt good. But the boy had just let the poor creature off his chain for a run. The snow in the yard lay thick and fluffy. Sharik bounded about like a hare, on his back legs one minute and his front legs the next, rushing from corner to corner of the yard and back again, with snow on his muzzle.

He ran to me, the shaggy creature, and jumped all over me, sniffed the bones—and off he went again, up to his belly in snow.

“I don’t want your bones,” he seemed to say, “just give me my freedom. . . .””
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sharik

Ivan Denisovich "in a nutshell"

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Solzhenitsyn biographer Joseph Pearce has posted a piece on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as part of his Great Literature in a Nutshell series.

“As the title suggests, the whole action of the novel takes place on one solitary day in the life of the protagonist. In this way, Solzhenitsyn takes the reader into the claustrophobically monotonous life of the prisoners, who follow the same routine day in, day out, with no seeming end in sight. We experience not merely the claustrophobic monotony but the chilling physical intensity of the experience.”
— Joseph Pearce