Stories and Prose Poems

A new edition of the Russian Nobelist's collection of novellas, short stories, and prose poems Stories and Prose Poems contains twenty-two works of widely varied style and character from the Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These shorter pieces demonstrate the extraordinary mastery of language that places Solzhenitsyn among the greatest Russian prose writers of the twentieth century. When the two superb stories "Matryona's House" and "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" were first published in Russia in 1963, the Moscow Literary Gazette, the mouthpiece of the Soviet literary establishment, wrote: "His talent is so individual and so striking that from now on nothing that comes from his pen can fail to excite the liveliest interest." For some readers the most exciting discovery will be the astonishing group of sixteen prose poems. In these works of varying lengths, Solzhenitsyn has distilled the joy and bitterness of Russia's fate into language of unrivaled lyrical purity.