Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

About One Day in the Life

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) was the first account of the Soviet Gulag published within the USSR — a literary and political earthquake that announced both a writer of the first order and the existence of a system of forced labour camps that official Soviet culture denied. The novel follows a single ordinary day in the life of Ivan Shukhov, a peasant sentenced to ten years for a fabricated charge; its power lies entirely in the restraint with which it records minute-to-minute survival. Solzhenitsyn later produced the monumental Gulag Archipelago and the major novels In the First Circle and Cancer Ward. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.