The Oak and the Calf is interesting in a purely literary sense as well [as for its political and social implications]. Like a diary, it pieces itself together before the reader's eyes. Each sentence is written in an unpredictable situation with unknown consequences for the author—and for history. That the reader is to some extent already aware of the outcome only gives the work its distinct double perspective. He is unnerved by the possibility that the author may be arrested and his manuscript destroyed at any moment, even though he realizes that the book in his hands has been miraculously rescued. These games with time and these mirror reflections remind one of Proust …, with the difference that here personal time is replaced by mortally dangerous historical time.
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn's book is unique in the way it interlaces the written word and the making of history. Supplement follows supplement; then, at the end, the book virtually transcends itself in a long series of documentary appendices. Even the five years that have passed since its publication in Russian figure in the present English edition. It possesses a kind of "open structure"; it is unfinished and cannot be finished.
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