The temptation is to dismiss [Prussian Nights] as the mediocre poetry of a great novelist. Unlike Dante or Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn is too concerned with catechesis to survive translation and transmutation into a culture significantly less friendly to poetry than the East European tradition from which he springs.

He has already tried his hand at other genre: two moderately successful plays, Love Girl and the Innocent and Candle in the Wind, as well as a number of short stories and prose poems….

What relates these secondary writings to the great novels and to Gulag is Solzhenitsyn's questioning of national and individual morality. He probes these problems much like a moral theologian pecking at a question of conscience or a surgeon sectioning a diseased organ….

Indeed, his pursuit of the problem of evil continues in Russian literature the tradition of Dostoyevsky and, in world literature, the tradition of the early...