In case you wondered ...

... Transmissions from a Lone Star: Why Solzhenitsyn still matters | Columnists | RIA Novosti.

Solzhenitsyn was always a prose architect of great skill, prone to experimenting with structure and narrative forms. He referred to the stories in Apricot Jam as “binary,” each tale in the book being a juxtaposition of two separate halves, linked by theme or character. However these halves are frequently separated in time and space, or are written from radically different points of view. The gap between the linked stories is crucial to their overall meanings; that which goes unsaid contains as much meaning as that which is written.