Jane Sullivan recalls the starkness of Solzhenitsyn in an English summer.

WHEN ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn's novels started appearing in the West, a 1968 review by Patricia Blake in The New York Times hailed his books as masterworks of 20th-century fiction and declared they had done what Camus had deemed impossible: "they compel the human imagination to participate in the agony and murder of millions that have been the distinguishing feature of our age".

Well, there's a turn-off for the casual reader. Who wants to be forced to feel the agony of millions? It's an unfortunate phrase, because although much of Solzhenitsyn's fiction is indeed stark, it's also totally engaging, and by no means unrelieved torture to read. He may be writing about millions but it's individual characters he makes us care about.

Now that he's left us, most of the obituaries and commentaries have focused on the big picture: his huge importance around the world as a political and moral figure, and his heroic defiance of the people who tried to silence him. A few have touched on the grumpy old man he became in later years. But there's another aspect to Solzhenitsyn's work: the small, intimate picture, the way he reaches out to the individual reader who may know very little about 20th-century Russia.

Like many young people of my generation, I first read some Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s. Along with Joseph Heller's Catch 22, it was what you read if you aspired to cultural literacy, or were simply curious. I remember reading his novel Cancer Ward, sprawled on my parents' lawn, trying to soak up the weak English summer sun.

It wasn't good summer reading in the usual sense, but it captivated me nonetheless. What was this grey prison-like world of ritual and routine? What exactly was cancer anyway? It wasn't an illness people talked about much in those days. I learnt much about the different forms of cancer, and how it was treated in a 1950s Soviet provincial hospital. I learnt much about how different people contemplate, or ignore, or defy their own approaching death.

Of course, I was vaguely aware this story was also an allegory of the political situation in Russia - "A man sprouts a tumour and then dies - how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?" asks one character. I didn't know enough then about life under Stalin to make much sense of that angle, but it didn't matter to me. This was a life that seemed unbearable. And yet everyone, in different ways, was bearing it, trying to make sense of it.

I felt much the same a few years later when I read Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich - but this book was much shorter, and to me more intense, vivid and powerful. It packed such a punch.

Again, conditions in the hard labour camp where Ivan is a political prisoner seem unbearable: extreme cold, boots that don't fit, gloves that rip, sadistic guards, never enough to eat. But Ivan is a survivor and a good, if wily, soul. He makes the best of things and he's optimistic. At the end of the day he goes to sleep content: he's had a few strokes of luck. It's infinitely more poignant than just hearing about his terrible day.

If you're a newcomer to Solzhenitsyn's work, curious to see what all the fuss is about, try an introduction such as The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, edited by Edward Ericson and Daniel Mahoney. But above all, read Ivan Denisovich.

janesullivan@iprimus.com.au