With the publication of The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn lays claim to yet another realm—that of autobiography….

Since Solzhenitsyn clearly possesses both literary credentials and a sense of mission, it is not surprising to find his book absorbing and significant. (p. 3)

It is as hard not to admire the author of The Oak and the Calf as it is not to be appalled by qualities so at variance with his calls for moral "repentance." Even his generally compassionate sketch of his benefactor, Tvardovsky, often reeks of acid….

Even more dismaying than Solzhenitsyn's personal characteristics are his political convictions and opinions, more worthy of a crude pamphleteer than of a responsible thinker. Those who have wondered whether Solzhenitsyn's increasingly strident and simple-minded views on the nature of Russia, communism and the West … represent perhaps some kind of an aberration, need wonder no longer: They are all expressed, in one form or another, in this memoir—the West is impotent, deprived of both "will and reason," and "practically on its knees" before the Soviet juggernaut,… communists—whether in Italy or in the Soviet Union—are all cut from the same cloth, and "liberals" and "social democrats" (many of whom, as the book so plainly demonstrates, came to his support in his most dire moments) are not much better.

The clue to the apparent contradiction between the "early" and "present" Solzhenitsyn is provided by the author himself. In a remarkable passage, Solzhenitsyn admits that in his "first works I was concealing my features from the police censorship—but by the same token, from the public at large. With each subsequent step I inevitably revealed more and more about myself." He knew that he would "inevitably lose [his] contemporaries," yet by so doing he was equally confident of "winning posterity." Many of Solzhenitsyn's splendid works—including pages of The Oak and the Calf—have no doubt already won him a place in the eyes of posterity. Yet it is sad to contemplate that if he indeed goes on to reveal "more and more" about himself, he stands not only to lose an increasing number of his contemporaries, but to win a more paltry verdict from posterity as well. (p. 12)