Enigma From the East

BETWEEN TWO MILLSTONES: Book I, Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978

BY ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

TRANSLATED BY PETER CONSTANTINE

University of Notre Dame Press, 480 pp., $35

IN FEBRUARY 1974, the Soviet Union stripped its best-known writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of his citizenship and exiled him to the West. Solzhenitsyn, taking up temporary residence in Switzerland, was confident he knew two things: what the West was like and how his planned novels about the Russian Revolution would unfold. As this first volume of his memoirs demonstrates, he turned out to be wrong about both. An enemy of the Soviet regime, he soon discovered that the culture of the West was also alien to his sensibility. He was