Put in a Word for the Poor Symbol

Abstract

In Solzhenitsyn's prose, time has a tendency to be compressed. So many people have written about this!—from Mariia Shneerson in her little book (published by Possev in 1984) to Petr Palamarchuk in his Guide to Solzhenitsyn [Putevoditel' po Solzhenitsynu] (published for the first time in Kuban', 1989, 1-4, and then everywhere, from Moscow to the outermost limits). Thanks to this "compression," events in the larger works of Solzhenitsyn are grouped around one, two, and three days, followed by a time lapse of a year or two or three, followed again by a one-, two-, or three-day narrative space, followed, again, by a lapse. Readers of The First Circle, The Red Wheel, and Cancer Ward have seen this for themselves.