The Oak and the Calf : Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union: a Memoir

"The Oak and the Calf" is Solzhenitsyn's own account of the decade between the almost accidental publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - the work of an unknown, underground writer - in 1962 to his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974. During those years of official disapproval and harassment he continued writing and revising, and managed to organize the publication of his plays, stories, manifestos and novels, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward", in the West.

In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize and once again found himself in the limelight, but this time set on a collision course with the Soviet authorities.

In 1974, his great work "The Gulag Archipelago" appeared in Russian in Paris, and very shortly afterwards in all the major languages of the world.

It was this book, with its blistering historical expose of the Soviet "corrective labour" camps (1918-1956), which led to his expulsion from the USSR in 1974.