Probably the most startling book to come out of Russia in recent years was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In massively compelling detail, it described the blighted existence of a prisoner in one of Stalin's detention camps at a time when the Soviet government had barely got around to admitting their existence. But Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years in just such a camp. And a question arose—was it impressive merely because it was autobiographically true? Now Solzhenitsyn's second book—a pair of short novels—has appeared. Even in a translation that is stolidly wooden, "We Never Make Mistakes" (University of South Carolina) demonstrates that Solzhenitsyn is not only politically courageous but also a writer of stature by any standard.
This time Solzhenitsyn's subjects are far less provocative — the life and death of an old peasant woman existing on the fringes of Soviet society; an incident between two soldiers in wartime. But in each, not so much from easy political resentment as from a profound accumulation of sorrow, Solzhenitsyn asks questions that challenge the validity of the whole Soviet system.
Reverse Hero. The hero of the first story is a lonely, goodhearted, un worldly army officer who has been stuck in a job as a traffic-control boss at a rail junction behind the receding Rus sian front in the fall of 1941. Lieut. Zotov exudes an innocent revolution ary zeal that clearly has no place in the cynical power structure of the Soviet world. In the '30s, when he volunteered to go to Spain, the authorities regarded him as some kind of nut and sent him back to the university. He is troubled because the war is not following the victorious blueprint that Joseph Stalin always said it would. His only solace is reading Das Kapital. "The worse the news from the war became," writes Solzhenitsyn, "the more he buried himself in this thick blue book."
Zotov is the precise reverse of the old cast-iron, pure-in-word-and-deed Soviet literary hero whom he outwardly resembles. His scruples about profiting from his command position at the railyard, his diffidence about sex, his devotion to duty are presented not as Soviet virtues grafted on him by the state but as signs of an inner innocence that is doomed to disillusion. The moment comes when Zotov is confronted by a "straggler"—one of the thousands of Russian soldiers who had been separated from their outfits in the confusion as the Germans advanced. Zotov is drawn to the man. He talks to him about his own life in Moscow, about the straggler's wife and children. Then, on the slightest possible evidence, he has to betray his new friend as a suspect spy. Vaguely, but with deep melancholy, Zotov begins to feel a sense of personal guilt, to comprehend the impossible strain that the Soviet regime has placed upon all human relationships.