ABSTRACT
Having given up his teaching post, Solzhenitsyn now had immeasurably more time in which to pursue his literary career. His first preoccupation was to get something else into print. His two plays and his verse had proved frustratingly unpopular with Tvardovsky and other knowledgeable readers, and much else that he had “in his desk drawer” was politically unacceptable, including his major work The First Circle. He felt, however, that if he picked out some chapters from the novel, they might just get by, and so he chose those dealing with the relationship between Gleb and Nadia Nerzhin and offered them to Tvardovsky as “a fragment,” without revealing that it was part of a completed novel. In The Oak and the Calf Solzhenitsyn writes that Tvardovsky rejected them as being about “that prison theme again,”1 but Reshetovskaya throws a slightly different light on the matter. According to her, Tvardovsky liked the chapters but thought that to start publication of the novel before he saw the rest of it and in this fragmentary fashion “would be unwise and might ruin the whole project.”2
