''Prussian Nights'' (russian: links=no, Прусские ночи) is a long poem by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...

, who served as a captain in the Soviet

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...

during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army's march across East Prussia, and focuses on the traumatic acts of rape and murder that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march. Originally it was Chapter 8 of his huge autobiographic poem ''Dorozhen'ka'' (The Road) that he wrote in 1947 as a ''

sharashka A Special Design Bureau (, ''osoboje konstruktorskoe bûro''; ОКБ), commonly informally known as a ''sharashka'' (russian: шара́шка, ; sometimes ''sharaga'', ''sharazhka'') was any of several secret research and development laboratories ...

'' (scientific research camp) inmate. The original poem did not survive, but in 1950–1951, working in a hard labour camp near

Ekibastuz Ekibastuz ( kk, Екібастұз, translit=Ekıbastūz, , ەكئباستۇز; russian: Экибастуз) is a city in Pavlodar Region, northeastern Kazakhstan. The population was Ekibastuz is served by Ekibastuz Airport. History The history ...

, Solzhenitsyn restored Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 (''The Feast of the Victors'') as separate poems.Milestones
by Georges Nivat The poem is in

trochaic tetrameter Trochaic tetrameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line of four trochaic feet. The etymology of the word Trochaic is the Greek word ''trokhaios'', from the verb ''trecho'', which means "I run". In classical metre, a trochee is a foot cons ...

, "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, Aleksandr Tvardovsky's '' Vasili Tyorkin''."Carl R. Proffer
Russia in Prussia
''The New York Times'', August 7, 1977 The poem is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences – he was a captain of an artillery battery which formed a part of the Second Belorussian Front, which invaded East Prussia from south-east in January 1945. The Soviet offensive followed the path of the disastrous offensive by the Russian Second Army under Alexander Samsonov during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

; the comparison with the Soviet victorious offensive is one of the underlying themes of the poem. Solzhenitsyn was arrested soon afterwards, in early February, three weeks after the offensive had started. His arrest was partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians.Prussian Nights: A Poem. Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Robert Conquest. Review of by Alfred M. de Zayas, The Review of Politics, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Jan., 1978), pp. 154–156
JSTOR
/ref> In the poem he recalls the pillages, rapes and murders committed by the Soviet troops taking their revenge on German civilians, the events which later resulted in the first part of the German exodus from Eastern Europe, Solzhenitsyn composed the poem—about twelve hundred lines and over fifty pages long—while he was serving a sentence of hard labor in

Gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...

camps.Robert Conquest, ''Preface to English Edition'', in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ''Prussian Nights: A Narrative Poem'', Collins and Harvill Press, 1977, , pp.6-7PATRICIA BLAKE
A Flight into Poetry
TIME, Monday, Jul. 25, 1977 He wrote a few lines of the poem each day on a bar of soap and memorized them while using it in his daily shower. He also wrote about how composing this poem helped him to survive his imprisonment: "I needed a clear head, because for two years I had been writing a poem—a most rewarding poem that helped me not to notice what was being done to my body. Sometimes, while standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted overhead . . . At such moments I was both free and happy . . . Some prisoners tried to escape by smashing a car through the barbed wire. For me there was no barbed wire. The head count of prisoners remained unchanged, but I was actually away on a distant flight." He wrote down the poem between the 1950s and 1970s. He made a recording of it in 1969; it was not published in Russian until 1974 when it was published in Paris, France. A German translation was done by Nikolaus Ehlert in 1976, and it was officially first translated into English by

Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...

in 1977. Critical reaction was mixed. The ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' reviewed it thus: "a clumsy and disjointed 1400 line narrative which can be called poetry only because it is written in meter and rhyme. Sent to any publishing house of émigré Russian journal bearing any name but Solzhenitsyn's, it would be rejected unhesitatingly." A reviewer in ''

New York Review of Books New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator ...

'' called ''Prussian Nights'', "for all its shortcomings, a powerful and moving work. The literary critic, author and poet Clive James took a more positive view:

See also

References

Further reading