Thomas, D.M. 1935–

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Thomas, D.M. 1935–

(Donald Michael Thomas)

PERSONAL: Born January 27, 1935, in Redruth, Cornwall, England; son of Harold Redvers (a builder) and Amy (a homemaker; maiden name, Moyle) Thomas; children: Caitlin, Sean, Ross. Education: New College, Oxford, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1958, M.A., 1961. Hobbies and other interests: "Besides sex and death, I am interested in Russian literature, music, most sports, and my Celtic homeland, Cornwall."

ADDRESSES: Home—The Coach House, Rashleigh Vale, Truro, Cornwall TR1 1TJ, England. Agent—John Johnson, Clerkenwell Green, London ECR 0HT, England.

CAREER: Poet, novelist, biographer, and translator. Grammar school English teacher in Teignmouth, Devonshire, England, 1960–64; Hereford College of Education, Hereford, England, lecturer, 1964–66, senior lecturer in English, 1966–79, head of department, 1977–79.

Visiting lecturer in English, Hamline University, 1967; visiting professor of literature, American University, spring, 1982. Military service: British Army, two years.

MEMBER: Bard of the Cornish Gorseth.

AWARDS, HONORS: Richard Hilary Award, 1960; Translators Award from British Arts Council, 1975, for translations of works by Anna Akhmatova; Cholmondeley Award, 1978, for poetry; Guardian/Gollancz Fantasy Novel Award, 1979, for The Flute-Player; Cheltenham Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Booker McConnell Prize nomination, all 1981, all for The White Hotel; Orwell Prize for Biography, 1998, for Solzhenitsyn.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Personal and Possessive, Outposts, 1964.

(With Peter Redgrove and D.M. Black) Modern Poets 11, Penguin, 1968.

Two Voices, Grossman, 1968.

Lover's Horoscope: Kinetic Poet, Purple Sage, 1970.

Logan Stone, Grossman, 1971.

The Shaft, Arc, 1973.

Symphony in Moscow, Keepsake Press, 1974.

Lilith-Prints, Second Aeon Publications, 1974.

Love and Other Deaths, Merrimack Book Service, 1975.

The Honeymoon Voyage, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1978.

Protest: A Poem after a Medieval Armenian Poem by Frik, privately printed, 1980.

Dreaming in Bronze, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1981.

Selected Poems, Viking (New York, NY), 1983.

(With Sylvia Kantaris) News from the Front, Arc, 1983.

The Puberty Tree: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1992.

Dear Shadows, Fal Publications (Truro, England), 2004.

FICTION; NOVELS, EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED

The Devil and the Floral Dance (juvenile), Robson, 1978.

The Flute-Player, Dutton (New York, NY), 1979.

Birthstone, Gollancz (London, England), 1980.

The White Hotel, Gollancz (London, England), 1980, Viking (New York, NY), 1981.

Flying in to Love, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1992.

Pictures at an Exhibition, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1993.

Eating Pavlova, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1994.

Lady with a Laptop, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1996.

Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre, Duck Editions, 2000.

"RUSSIAN NIGHTS" SERIES; NOVELS

Ararat, Viking (New York, NY), 1983.

Swallow, Viking (New York, NY), 1984.

Sphinx, Gollancz (London, England), 1986, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

Summit, Gollancz (London, England), 1987, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

Lying Together, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

EDITOR

The Granite Kingdom: Poems of Cornwall, Barton, 1970.

Poetry in Crosslight (textbook), Longman (London, England), 1975.

Songs from the Earth: Selected Poems of John Harris, Cornish Miner 1829–84, Lodenek Press, 1977.

TRANSLATOR

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem and Poem without a Hero, Ohio University Press (Athen, OH), 1976.

Anna Akhmatova, Way of All the Earth, Ohio University Press (Athen, OH), 1979.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Invisible Threads, Macmillan (London, England), 1981.

Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Dove in Santiago, Viking (New York, NY), 1983.

Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov, Sixth Chamber Press, 1985.

Anna Akhmatova, You Will Hear Thunder: Poems, Ohio University Press (Athen, OH), 1985.

Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1989.

OTHER

Memories and Hallucinations: A Memoir, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Hell Fire Corner (play), first produced in Truro, England, 2004.

Some of Thomas's translations have been adapted as radio plays, including You Will Hear Thunder, 1981, and Boris Godunov, 1984. Work represented in anthologies, including Best SF: 1969, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, Putnam, 1970; Inside Outer Space, edited by Robert Vas Dias, Anchor Books, 1970; and Twenty-three Modern British Poets, edited by John Matthias, Swallow Press, 1971. Contributor to literary journals in England and the United States.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1980, after spending nearly a year closeted in a small study at Oxford University, D.M. Thomas emerged with the manuscript for his third novel. Known until that time primarily as a poet and translator of Russian verse, Thomas first branched out into adult fiction with the 1979 book The Flute-Player, a fantasy-like meditation on art and its struggle to endure and even flourish in a totalitarian regime. A second fantasy novel, Birthstone, followed soon after; it tells the story of a woman trying to create a single, stable identity out of the fragmented parts of her personality. Both works—especially The Flute-Player, which won a contest for best fantasy novel—received praise for their imaginative, poetic treatments of familiar themes, but neither sold more than a few hundred copies.

Upon its publication in late 1980, Thomas's The White Hotel, seemed destined for the same fate. A complex blend of the real and the surreal and of the apparent dichotomy between the Freudian concepts of the pleasure instinct and the death instinct, the work generated relatively little interest among British critics and readers; what reaction there was, the author later recalled in a New York Times Magazine article, could best be summed up as "restrained approval." Within just a few months, however, it became clear that on the other side of the Atlantic, at least, that would not be the case. Published in the United States in the spring of 1981, The White Hotel met with what William Borders referred to in New York Times as a "thunderclap of critical praise" that sparked sales and made Thomas an instant celebrity. Already into its second printing before the official publication date, The White Hotel eventually sold more than 95,000 copies in its hardcover edition and almost 1.5 million copies in the paperback reprint—making it without a doubt "the sleeper novel of the season," to quote a Publishers Weekly writer. While Thomas's more recent work has been viewed as uneven by critics, his imaginative approach to fiction has gained him a place as a significant practitioner of postmodernist technique.

Divided into seven distinct sections, The White Hotel begins with a prologue that consists of a series of letters to, from, or about psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and several of his colleagues in which the doctor discusses the case of one of his female patients, "Frau Anna G.," who is suffering from a severe hysterical illness. Her psychic distress manifests itself physically as asthma, anorexia, pains in the left breast and ovary, and a general feeling of anxiety that conventional treatments have not alleviated. In his letters, Freud speculates that the case of "Frau Anna G." will substantiate his theory of a death instinct that coexists with the erotic one.

Following the prologue are two sections devoted to writings by the mysterious "Frau Anna G." herself. The first sample is a long poem in which "Anna" describes an erotic fantasy she has concerning an affair with Freud's son. The affair begins in a train compartment and continues at a lakeside "white hotel," where a series of explicit and unusual love scenes is played out against a backdrop of horrible death and destruction involving other guests at the hotel; none of the violence, however, interferes with or diminishes the lovers' passion and self-absorbed pursuit of physical pleasure. The second writing sample, ostensibly written at Freud's request, is an expanded prose version of "Anna"'s fantasy, "a wild, lyrical, irrational embroidery upon her original," remarked Thomas Flanagan in Nation. According to Village Voice critic Laurie Stone, it is this prose version that serves as "a key to [Anna's] fears, imaginative transformations, and clairvoyant projections."

The fourth section of The White Hotel is comprised of Freud's long analysis of the case of "Frau Anna G.," now revealed to be Lisa Erdman, an opera singer of Russian-Jewish descent. A pastiche of actual case histories written by Freud, the section connects Lisa's fantasies to events in her real life and concludes with the doctor's observation that "she was cured of everything but life, so to speak…. She took away with her a reasonable prospect of survival, in an existence that would doubtless never be less than difficult." Sections five and six chronicle the course of Lisa's life after she is treated and "cured" by Freud, the conventional narrative ending with a chilling account of her execution in 1941 at Babi Yar along with thousands of other Russian Jews. At this point the reader discovers what Lisa's fantasies mean, both in terms of her own life and death and, in a broader sense, European society in the twentieth century.

The White Hotel's seventh and final section is a surreal epilogue in which Lisa, now in a purgatory-like land that is unmistakably Palestine, is reunited with people who had figured prominently in her life, including her mother and Freud. There, too, in this strange place are thousands of other souls awaiting forgiveness, love, and understanding; Lisa is last seen agreeing to help the latest wave of "immigrants" settle in: "No one could, or would, be turned away; for they had nowhere else to go."

The initial reaction to The White Hotel among British critics was "bafflingly contradictory," as Thomas himself reported in New York Times Magazine. Among the few major periodicals that published reviews, the discussions often highlighted the novel's pornographic content, especially the two chapters containing Lisa's poetic and prose versions of her fantasy. Punch reviewers Mary Anne Bonney and Susan Jeffreys, for example, dismissed the entire book as "humorlessly insubstantial" and singled out Lisa's poem in particular as "a sexual fantasy of some crudity and little literary worth." Commenting in Times Literary Supplement, Anne Duchene agreed that the early sections of the book "are not for the squeamish," but conceded that "they have to be undergone, by committed readers, as part of the raw material for the later, much more interesting sections."

Even the most gracious British reviews were, at best, reluctant in their praise. Though London Review of Books critic Robert Taubman also found the sexual scenes "not real or erotic," with an "unconvincing look of pornography," he nevertheless went on to declare: "The analysis that follows sounds an authentic note…. At the same time, it provides the reader with an absorbing Chinese box narrative of hidden memories, reversals of meaning and deceptions uncovered." A reviewer for Encounter compared reading The White Hotel to watching an Ingmar Bergman film: "You are battered with symbolism, in perpetual pursuit of images, of references, of bizarre surrealist objects…. I'm not sure that I enjoyed it, but I am certainly respectful."

U.S. critics were far less inclined than the British to make an issue out of The White Hotel's sexual content. The few who even raised the possibility described Thomas's poem and its prose rendition as highly erotic rather than pornographic; several reviewers mentioned that the decision to use such a technique is an unusual and very effective way of revealing the soul of Lisa Erdman. Though George Levine commented in New York Review of Books that the author's language is occasionally "merely vulgar or banal," he went on to note that it often achieves "a lush, romantic intensity, with a remarkable precision of imagery. [The] writing is full of dislocation and surprise; it is seductive, frightening, and beautifully alive…. Such language immediately established the mysterious 'Anna G.' as a powerful presence." Leslie Epstein expressed a similar opinion, declaring in New York Times Book Review that "the poem seems to speak directly from the unconscious." In short, wrote Time reviewer Paul Gray, The White Hotel "easily transcends titillation. Those who come to the novel with prurient interests alone will quickly grow baffled and bored."

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer stated in Chicago's Tribune Books that "the bones of a wonderful story are here [in The White Hotel], but Lisa Erdman and her world do not come alive…. Thomas loses sight of his own characters, his own obligation to breathe life and power into his fictional world." Epstein agreed, pointing out that Lisa "seems to float through the various crises that afflict her," and she has "no intellectual life" despite the complex political, social, and cultural forces that swirl around her. She is, in essence, no more that a "casualty at first of her psyche and then of history," in Taubman's opinion. In addition, Epstein contended, "The notion of the death instinct is shaky enough in Freud's own theory, and the application of a 'struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct' to this poor patient strikes me as nothing more that a bald assertion, unsupported by the evidence."

Following The White Hotel, Thomas turned his novelist energies to Ararat, the first book in what became a trilogy and then stretched further into the "Russian Nights" quintet, dedicated to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In Ararat the author sets up the beginning of an intricately woven mesh of deceptions that continues and grows through most of the quintet. As Ararat opens, the Russian poet Rozanov goes to Gorki to sleep with a blind woman who is writing a thesis on his poetry. Finding her unappealing as a sexual partner, he agrees to invent and tell a story on a subject she chooses, which turns out to be improvisation. In the story he improvises, there are three other storytellers—all writers attending a conference in Russian Armenia—who vie with each other in an improvisation contest. One of the tales offered in the contest includes a fragment of an unfinished Pushkin story novelist Thomas had actually translated, and that work is presented by the storyteller, the poet Surkov, as still being in progress, with himself as composer. In this story of Pushkin's—or Surkov's—there is an Italian storyteller who gives an inspired improvisation on a subject proposed for him by a St. Petersburg audience. Thus in Rozanov's telling, which involves on a second level the storytelling of the three others, stories and storytellers multiply within and around each other. As they do so, it becomes increasingly unclear who is the improviser and where the line is to be drawn between truth and fiction.

Ararat, like The White Hotel before it, met with a mixed critical reception, though not divided so dramatically along British and American lines as before. Galen Strawson, writing for Times Literary Supplement, admired both the complexity and the disarray of the novel's construction and praised Thomas's portrayal of the "unwaveringly egotistical and calculatingly promiscuous" author. Strawson remarked, however, that "there are some very self-indulgent passages in this book … and some very slack ones too." He commented further that "a puzzle does not make a work of literature; even if responses elicited by the former, as it works its illusion of depth and significance, can easily be mistaken for responses elicited by the latter." Isabel Raphael, reviewing Ararat for the London Times, found the structure "extraordinarily unpleasant," comparing it to "one of those Russian dolls, with its tantalizingly identical layers leading to an ultimately impenetrable heart." Further, she noted, "Whereas The White Hotel was a triumphant hymn to the power of sexuality," in Ararat "every act of love [is] a violation couched in obscene language and calculated to sicken and revolt." Anthony Burgess expressed the view in Punch that Thomas "is to be watched, but with great suspicion."

Comparisons between Ararat and The White Hotel were inevitable, both because of the former's success and because of the unusual structures of each. In New Republic, Ann Tyler pointed out that Ararat "takes its title from its preoccupation with the Armenian diaspora of 1915." The depiction of Nazi atrocities in The White Hotel, the critic recalled, "appeared to have some point; everything led up to it…. [Ararat] was disturbing to read, but one felt it was necessarily disturbing…. The Armenian tragedy is merely one more quirky scene in a book that's full of quirky scenes." She also reasoned, "Books are meant to carry us to other lives…. When a book drives its readers to diagramming the plot, you know it's not going to carry you very far." Diane Johnson made a more positive comparison in New York Times Book Review, arguing that Ararat, like The White Hotel, "provides an abundant display of the author's astonishing virtuosity in poetry, in prose, in translating—a writer combining an impassioned European soul with the formal instincts of a spider weaving an immensely complex, elegant and sophisticated web."

In Swallow and Sphinx, Thomas carries his Ararat characters into more stories within stories and through narrative constructions that, like those in Ararat and The White Hotel, call into play not only prose but poetry and dreams. In Swallow Rozanov becomes a fiction, a creation of the Italian storyteller Corinna, who was introduced in Ararat and who is now participating in an Olympiad, an international poetic improvisation contest. Corinna improvises not only Rozanov but also tells the story of Ararat, which elicits two opposite critical responses from the judges—much as Thomas's actual novel did from critics.

An insight provided by Swallow, as noted by Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is that both the apparently "real" storytellers and the storytellers they create in their improvisations "are all variations of the same figure: the Soviet artist who navigates between libertarian impulses and the need to be officially supported. They travel, they prosper, they agonize and womanize and conduct a nicely calculated battle between speaking out and selling out." Eder found Swallow to be, "despite occasional indulgences,… an often-captivating book. Some flights are aborted, but most catch some flash of unsuspected light." John Leggett, on the other hand, felt that "while it is surely an unkindness to an author to give away the ending of his story, the resolution of Mr. Thomas's Olympiad strikes me as such a cop-out that I feel obliged to do just that"—whereupon he did, in New York Times Book Review. Though he liked the "attractive architectural plan" of the book, Leggett believed that it raises expectations it fails to meet. "Alongside The White Hotel, which dealt so beguilingly with erotic fantasy and Freudian analysis," the critic concluded, "Swallow seems a bird of tawdry feather."

In a New York Times review of the third "Russian Nights" novel, Walter Goodman perceived that the sphinx of the title "may be Russia itself." Sphinx brings back some of the series' earlier characters and introduces two new ones: Soviet Jewish storyteller Shimon Barash, and a Welsh journalist named Lloyd George. Goodman dubbed Sphinx "a virtuoso performance," though he believed it did not "glisten quite as brightly as Ararat or provide the belly laughs of Swallow."

George Stade explained Sphinx in New York Times Book Review as "a kind of trilogy" in itself, "a continuation that recapitulates the whole as we have it. Part One is an expressionist play, Part Two a prose narrative, Part Three a narrative poem." Though he acknowledged that the first three novels in the "Russian Nights" series could be enjoyed on their own, he added that there is "no doubt that, from volume to volume, Mr. Thomas's meanings, especially those he grafts onto the concept of improvisation, sprout, grow, exfoliate in all directions."

"Thomas clearly had a lot of fun writing Summit," surmised William French in the Toronto Globe and Mail of the series' fourth book. "But beneath his japery," French continued, "we can glimpse several serious themes. Perhaps the strongest one is the difficulty of communicating, one human being to another, and being understood." This is part of what Summit demonstrates through its plot, involving a meeting in Geneva between superpower leaders Grobichov and "Tiger" O'Reilly, the U.S. president who was formerly a movie star and is accompanied by his vice president, Shrub. Anthony Olcott in Washington Post Book World faulted Summit's attempt at farce and satire, citing Thomas's failure to "take the wholly unimaginable and persuade us that indeed, perhaps, these men, these leaders are capable of such grotesqueries" as they commit at the summit. On a more positive note, recalling that Thomas tells the reader that the entire story is "the dream of a woman about to die in an air crash," Olcott concluded that the "Russian Nights" series "also slams into the ground with [Summit,]… but that only enhances Thomas's point in the whole quartet, that life's beauty lies in the dreaming, as his art so well conveys." Michiko Kakutani, writing in New York Times, described the novel as "a clever and often hilarious entertainment that opens a small window on the absurdities and perils of modern history."

The title of Thomas's 1992 novel, Flying in to Love, refers to the Dallas, Texas airfield John F. Kennedy flew into in 1963, shortly before his assassination, and the novel focuses on the late president and the figures who were near him, both physically and professionally, at the time of his death. In the words of T.J. Binyon in Times Literary Supplement, "Characters carom against each other like billiard balls, touching but not communicating, and each break takes us back to Kennedy himself to explore further aspects of his character." Binyon ultimately judged Flying in to Love to be, "despite its narrative pretensions … just another fictionalized investigation into the circumstances surrounding Kennedy's death."

In a Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography essay, Karen Dorn quoted Thomas as reporting that, af-ter he had finished the first draft of Flying in to Love, he had a dream that revealed a link between his compelling interest in Kennedy and his grief over his father's death, and that connected Kennedy's Camelot with the Cornish castle associated with the history and mythology of King Arthur. "Readers familiar with Thomas's interests," Dorn wrote in closing, "will remember the 1982 BBC radio talk in which he recalled Boris Pasternak's remark in Doctor Zhivago … that the artist is always meditating on death and thus always creating new life."

Thomas's 1993 novel, Pictures at an Exhibition, returns to the same territory of The White Hotel. Pictures shares many elements with Thomas's earlier novel: it comprises several distinct sections; it mixes actual historical events and persons with fictional ones; and it deals heavily with the Holocaust. In the novel's first section, a doctor working at the Auschwitz concentration camp seeks treatment for terrible headaches from a Jewish prisoner of the camp. The second section jumps to present-day London, and features many of the characters introduced in the first section. Subsequent sections include a collection of Nazi documents, reproduced verbatim, that describe the mass killing of ninety Jewish children. Thomas features several unsettling paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch as a backdrop to his story.

Critics were mixed in their assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition. Frederick Busch, writing in New York Times Book Review, praised the manner in which the novelist sets up his plot, calling "Thomas's construction of a narrative puzzle that we become eager to unlock … masterly." However, Busch concluded, Thomas fails to pull all of the novel's pieces together into an effective whole: "The book proves alternately horrifying and annoying … its plot is tied together in an unconvincing Freudian bundle." Chicago's Tribune Books contributor Andy Solomon, while admitting that Thomas's novel is disturbing, avers that "By the end, the plot has become a swirl of anguish, guilt and loss."

Returning to Freud for inspiration, Eating Pavlova is a fictional account of the psychoanalyst's final days. Thomas features a Freud who has vivid sexual fantasies as he is dying of cancer and who struggles to define his relationship with his daughter, Anna. "This is a Freud designed to pep up any party," remarked David Buckley in the London Observer. While noting the author's loose interpretation of the facts of Freud's life, New Statesman reviewer David Cohen called the book "strange and often moving" and declared that "Thomas is so outrageous that no one should complain of his fact-mangling."

Thomas departs from the terrain of psychoanalysis and Holocaust themes in his 1996 novel Lady with a Laptop, deemed "perfectly pleasant but inconsequential picture of a group of would-be writers at a creative writing course" held on the Greek island of Skagathos, by a Publishers Weekly contributor. The protagonist, the mildly successful British author leading the class, experiences bad luck and angst, but "as adventure becomes misadventure, the authorial tongue remains lodged in authorial cheek," commented Chicago's Tribune Books reviewer Nicholas Delbanco. Also set in the present day is Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre, and his protagonist is also attending a writer's event on a remote island. This time the protagonist is a woman, Miranda, and her story is woven into Charlotte Bront?'s classic story of Jane Eyre. Noting that Thomas's "postmodern tale within a tale about a tale proliferates" throughout Charlotte, New Statesman reviewer Patricia Duncker found the novel's intertwining plot threads—Miranda's abusive past, lackluster marriage, and sexual experimentation and Jane's short and equally lackluster marriage to Rochester—seductive but "uneven." While noting that the novel ill-serves Bront?'s novel as a fitting conclusion, a Publishers Weekly contributor explained that Charlotte is "a variation of Thomas's exploration of the 'landscape of hysteria,'" as set forth in The White Hotel.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life marks Thomas's first foray into biography. Solzhenitsyn, the uncompromising Russian writer and former political prisoner best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, and Oak and Calf, is sympathetically portrayed by Thomas, who admires his subject's literary artistry, his adherence to principle, and his determination to be his own man. Despite such adulation, Solzhenitsyn, who for his part never granted Thomas an interview, was displeased with the work, which draws upon interviews with his first wife and speculates rather than relying on fact. While noting that Alexander Solzhenitsyn resembles "a highly charged, over-sentimental novel" rather than a work of scholarship, New Statesman contributor Jan Dalley nonetheless maintained that Thomas's book is valuable due to the fact that Communism, the cold war, and the Russian dissident's role in standing up against communism's evils "is becoming obscure with extraordinary speed. Even well-educated 20 year olds today hardly know what the Iron Curtain was, and fell no tiny shudder at the letters K, G and B." Lesley Chamberlain, writing in Los Angles Times Book Review, praised the work, writing that Thomas "deserves our thanks for writing a marvelously readable, indispensable book about an impossibly complex man." In Booklist Ray Olson noted that, taking into account Thomas's perspective as "utterly anti-Communist," his biography of Solzhenitsyn "is more excitingly, artfully readable than most good biographies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 8: Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 11, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13, 1980, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 31, 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1982, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Weibel, Paul, Reconstruction the Past: G. and The White Hotel, Two Contemporary "Historical" Novels, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 1997, Ray Olson, review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, p. 666.

Choice, June, 1999, V.D. Barooshian, review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, p. 1794.

Christian Century, June 17, 1998, Eric E. Erickson, Jr., "Solzhenitsyn's Century," p. 12.

Contemporary Review, August, 1998, Virginia Rounding, review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, p. 105.

Critique, fall, 2001, p. 63.

Detroit News, March 22, 1981; November 17, 1982.

Encounter, August, 1981; July-August, 1983.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 10, 1984; July 21, 1984; February 27, 1988; August 4, 1990.

Journal of Modern Literature, fall, 1995, p. 328.

Library Journal, October 15, 1993, p. 91; September 1, 1994, p. 217; May 1, 1996, David W. Henderson, review of Lady with a Laptop, p. 135.

London Review of Books, February 5, 1981; April 1, 1983.

Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1981; October 11, 1988.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 31, 1982; April 3, 1983; November 18, 1984; January 2, 1994, p. 6; February 15, 1998, p. 8.

Nation, May 2, 1981; April 23, 1983.

New Leader, April 20, 1981; May 30, 1983.

New Republic, March 28, 1981; April 4, 1983.

New Statesman, June 22, 1979; March 21, 1980; January 16, 1981; March 4, 1983; June 29, 1984; May 13, 1994, p. 40; March 13, 1998, Jan Dalley, review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, p. 52; May 22, 2000, Patricia Duncker, review of Charlotte, p. 55.

Newsweek, March 16, 1981; March 15, 1982; April 4, 1983.

New Yorker, March 30, 1981.

New York Review of Books, May 28, 1981; June 16, 1983; November 22, 1984; December 3, 1998, p. 36.

New York Times, March 13, 1981; March 24, 1981; September 21, 1982; March 29, 1983; October 31, 1984; January 21, 1987; July 24, 1990.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1981; June 28, 1981; September 26, 1982; March 27, 1983; November 4, 1984; January 18, 1987; October 2, 1988; July 8, 1990; October 31, 1993, p. 13; October 23, 1994, p. 28; March 1, 1998, p. 9.

New York Times Magazine, June 13, 1982.

Observer (London, England), June 24, 1979; February 27, 1983; July 1, 1984; April 17, 1994, p. 22.

People, June 29, 1981.

Publishers Weekly, March 27, 1981; April 17, 1981; January 8, 1982; August 22, 1994; April 15, 1996, review of Lady with a Laptop, p. 48; December 1, 1997, p. 37; May 14, 2001, review of Charlotte, p. 55.

Punch, October 14, 1981; March 2, 1983.

School Library Journal, March, 1993, p. 236.

Spectator, February 21, 1998, Raymond Carr, review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, p. 28.

Time, March 16, 1981; April 25, 1983.

Times (London, England), January 15, 1981; March 3, 1983; June 9, 1983; March 10, 1984; June 28, 1984; October 15, 1988.

Times Higher Education Supplement, December 25, 1998, p. 24.

Times Literary Supplement, November 30, 1979; March 14, 1980; January 16, 1981; January 22, 1982; Feb ruary 25, 1983; June 29, 1983; June 29, 1984; July 1-7, 1988; February 7, 1992.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 22, 1981; June 12, 1983; November 7, 1993, p. 3; June 9, 1996, p. 9.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1982.

Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1996, p. A12.

Washington Post, December 15, 1979; January 27, 1982.

Washington Post Book World, March 15, 1981; May 16, 1982; March 27, 1983; September 9, 1984; January 24, 1988; October 2, 1988.