Sunday book pick: Twenty-four hours in a Soviet gulag in ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’

“In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?”

The 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature awardee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. It was translated into Russian from English by HT Willetts in 1991. It is the only one based entirely on the original Russian text and the only one authorised by Solzhenitsyn.

The novel’s publication was a watershed moment in Soviet literary history – never before had an account of Stalinist repressions been written about in such a manner. In October 1964, it suddenly became a controversial topic to write about and Solzhenitsyn’s later novels were published abroad and circulated within the Soviet Union illegally. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and in 1974, he was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and exiled from the Soviet Union. He remained a “stateless person” till 1990.

From daybreak till night

One Day follows the life of Ivan Denisovich (Shukhov), a prisoner and an ordinary...

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