One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Had he not said he had been in German hands he would have gotten a medal.īy telling the truth he was sentenced to a concentration camp as a 'spy.' Had he not confessed being a 'spy' he would have been shot. His 'crime' was to escape from the Germans who took him prisoner in 1943 and return to his own lines. Ivan Denisovich Shukov, his central figure, is a simple peasant. He has created a small, almost flawless classic employing the eloquence of reticence and understatement in a manner which even the fumbling of hurried translation cannot obscure. Solzhenitsyn has written no mere propagandistic expose. (It took Premier Khrushchev's personal okay to get the story published.) Small wonder that all 95,000 copies of Novy Mir vanishedĪlmost before they hit the newsstands and that they now sell for $10 a copy. Story, no Soviet writer had tackled this most terrible and characteristic feature of the Stalin era. Until the November issue of the literary journal, Novy Mir, appeared with Solzhenitsyn's In the Soviet Union, of course, it has been a sensation. So it is with Solzhenitsyn's remarkable tale. Yet, each of these works changed our perception of the known facts. The cruelty, the falseness of the charges, the animal fight for survival, the debasement, the cynical grafting, the brutalizing, the sentences stretching into infinity (orĭeath), the hunger, the suffering, the cold-all this is familiar.īut the same might have been said of conditions in Russian prisons before Dostoyevsky wrote his 'Notes, from the House of the Dead.' The story of political prisoners in Siberia was well known before George Kennan wrote his famous 'Siberia There is hardly a detail in Solzhenitsyn's story which, in itself is new. 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' is his first literary work, the simple story of one day Solzhenitsyn is a 44-year-old mathematics teacher in the old Russian town of Ryazan who spent eight years in Stalinís concentration camps. The reason for this is a rather short, sparsely told, eloquent, explosive, work by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which today reaches the American public Suddenly, in Moscow, it would appear, everyone wants to write about life in the Stalin concentration camps. Other subjects besides 'the camps' to write about. Illyiehev, the Soviet propaganda boss, made a rather plaintive speech to the young writers of Moscow. SALISBURYĮw York - Two or three weeks ago Leonid F. JanuOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich By HARRISON E.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn