SOURCE: “Russia's Stern Conscience,” in Washington Post Book World, March 1, 1998, pp. 4-5.

In the following review, Woll offers negative evaluation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

D. M. Thomas, prominent poet and novelist, has a longstanding interest in Russia. His early, controversial novel The White Hotel grew out of Anatoly Kuznetsov's impassioned fictional account of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev. He has translated Russian poetry, and he loops together five of his novels under the title “Russian Nights Quintet.”

All the less reason, then, for him to undertake this biography. He knew the pitfalls. Solzhenitsyn's work is so patently autobiographical that a biographer has only two justifications for his own work. One is to dig up information unknown to his reader, the other is to delve deep psychologically, offering insights of which Solzhenitsyn himself and earlier biographers are incapable. Thomas does very little of the first...