"We Never Make Mistakes": Two Short Novels

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 - Fiction - 138 pages
"'An incident at Krechetovka Station' ... concerns a Red Army lieutenant confronted at his World War II rail junction command with a disturbing army straggler and a decision about what to do with him. ['Matryona's house'] is the tale of an old peasant woman, whose tenacious and humorous struggle against cold, hunger, and greedy relatives is depicted by a young man who, after her death, finally understands who she was."--Page 4 of cover

From inside the book

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1996)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucusus Mountains. He received a degree in physics and math from Rostov University in 1941. He served in the Russian army during World War II but was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons and labor camps and, later, exile, before being allowed to return to central Russia, where he worked as a high school science teacher. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was arrested for treason and exiled following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to Switzerland and later the U. S. where he continued to write fiction and history. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to his homeland. His other works include The First Circle and The Cancer Ward. He died due to a heart ailment on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89.

Bibliographic information