The recent publication in Russia of a collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s early work, The Path, has “confirmed his status as a living classic,” says Victor Sonkin in this Moscow Times review. “The collection reveals sides of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and memoirist little known before,” notes Sonkin, “most notably, his early attempts at poetry. As it turns out, Solzhenitsyn’s reasons for composing verse in his youth were quite prosaic. Confined to labor camps and exile in the 1940s and 1950s, the author dared not write his ideas down, and so composed them in his mind instead. Naturally, poems were easier to memorize.” Of course, there’s one little problem, notes Sonkin: “His poetry is sometimes painfully bad.”