The Oak and the Calf, subtitled Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, is a memoir by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, about his attempts to publish work in his own country.

[4] The memoir contains a detailed account of the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the author's often complex relationship with the editor-in-chief Aleksandr Tvardovsky.

[5] It also describes Solzhenitsyn's failed attempts to publish his other early novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, the political storm caused by his 1970 Nobel Prize for literature and his subsequent exile from the Soviet Union.

He began to write at this time and spent the first three months of 1937 intensively studying in the Rostov libraries,[13] During World War II, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army[14] and was involved in major action at the front, for which he was twice-decorated.

[17] In 1961, he sent the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Alexander Tvardovsky, poet and chief editor of Novy Mir (Новый Мир - "New World") literary magazine.

[18] Following Khrushchev's fall from power, the political climate in the Soviet Union hardened and the "thaw" in literary censorship ended under Leonid Brezhnev.