"Except for The First Circle, I was not a big admirer of the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I always thought that his major works were not noteworthy for the subject matter--writing about survival in a totalitarian state, while still in a totalitarian state--than for his literary craftsmanship. The writing itself was rarely exceptional, although your comments make me wish I had read the translation you obtained rather than the American ones.
In part, my disappointment with his writing also stemmed from the fact that his writing was frequently derivative of some of Dostoevsky's earlier works, such as House of the Dead (1962), which describes Dostoevsky's experiences as a political prisoner under the Czar, and whose writing is far more powerful.
This is not to trivialize the great courage it must have taken to write these books when and where Solzhenitsyn was living. But I've always struggled to appreciate them as first-rate literature." SD
Even The First Circle failed the smell test, for me.
I had read all of Dostoyevsky.
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