In volume 28 of the Collected Works, A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s memoir prose “A Calf Butted an Oak Tree” is published. Introducing the book, the author ironically classified it as secondary literature, perhaps not so necessary for the reader. With the same book, he showed with fascinating authenticity that literature is inseparable from life, and the achievements of an artist are from his ability to recognize and accept his purpose. Here the documented chronicle of the writer’s labors and forced struggles, phantasmagoric sketches of that deathly vulgar sphere that was then called “literary life”, loving portraits of people actively faithful to freedom and culture (the “invisible” people who helped Solzhenitsyn, but not only them) were naturally combined here, the tragic a story about the fate of an older brother, unlike the author, the great poet A. T. Tvardovsky. This prose is full of intense confessional self-reflection, reflections on the possibility of spiritual straightening of the individual, on the past, present and future of Russia. The reader will encounter many bitter and terrible pages, but no less sparklingly cheerful pages, dispelling the clouds, confidently promising the victory of truth and goodness over wretched, mediocre and deceitful evil. Written during the years of “butting against the oak”, which took revenge on the writer by expulsion from the fatherland, the book lives in the spirit of freedom, joy and gratitude to the Creator.