Paperback: "On one long winter workday in camp, as I was lugging a handbarrow together with another man, I asked myself how one might portray the totality of our camp existence. In essence, it should suffice to give a thorough description of a single day, providing minute details and focusing on the most ordinary kind of worker; that would reflect the entirety of our experience. It wouldn’t even be necessary to give examples of any particular horrors. It shouldn’t be an extraordinary day at all, but rather a completely unremarkable one, the kind of day that will add up to years. That was my conception, and it lay dormant in my mind for nine years." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
From 1950 to 1953, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the forced-labor camp of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. Prisoners here were stripped of their names and were addressed by the identifying number inscribed on patches sewn to their caps, chest, back, and knee. The writer was assigned to a masonry brigade, then to a foundry, and this is the camp described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963).
In May 1959, when Solzhenitsyn was living in Ryazan, he finally sat down to write Щ-854 (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). He wrote it and put it away. He risked offering it for publication only some two years later, after Khrushchev’s vociferous attack on Stalin’s “cult of personality” at the Twenty-second Party Congress.
He sent the manuscript, still titled Щ-854, to the Moscow journal Novy Mir in the fall of 1961. The editor of the journal’s prose section, Anna Berzer, was quick to grasp the significance of the unusual submission, and passed it on to Novy Mir’s editor-in-chief, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, with the remark that it was about “a prison camp though the eyes of a peasant, a very national kind of work.”
This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a world where survival is all. Here safety, warmth and food are the first objectives. Reading it, you enter a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold - and participate in the struggle of men to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life.
Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is first published in the Soviet Union in 1963 and its first translation published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1962. Subsequently, it was published in Penguin Books in 1963 and reprinted in Penguin Classics in 2000. It is translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classics.
If you enjoyed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you might also like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, available in Penguin Classics.
About the author: Though twice-decorated for his service at the front during the Second World War, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was arrested in 1945 for making derogatory remarks about Stalin, and sent to a series of brutal Soviet labour camps in the Arctic Circle, where he remained for eight years. Released after Stalin's death, he worked as a teacher, publishing his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with the approval of Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, to huge success. His 1967 novel Cancer Ward, as well as his magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago, were not as well-received by Soviet authorities, and not long after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the USSR. In 1994, after twenty years in exile, Solzhenitsyn made his long-awaited return to Russia.
Of his works, Penguin also publish August 1914 and November 1916, both being the first and second volumes of The Red Wheel.
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