Prussian Nights

Prussian Nights (Russian: Прусские ночи) is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who served as a captain in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War.

Originally it was Chapter 8 of his huge autobiographic poem Dorozhen'ka (The Road), that he wrote in 1947 as a sharashka (scientific research camp) inmate.

"[2] 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.

Solzhenitsyn composed the poem—about twelve hundred lines and over fifty pages long—while he was serving a sentence of hard labor in Gulag camps.

[3][6] 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.

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 .

The New York Times reviewed it thus: "a clumsy and disjointed 1,400-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.

At the very least, this poem should help to give us an adequate idea of the creative power which the young Solzhenitsyn brought to the task of re-establishing objective truth in a country whose government had devoted so much murderous energy to proving that there can be no such thing.