A Nobel Prize–winning indictment of the totalitarian state. Solzhenitsyn’s description of Soviet life in a forced labour camp stemmed from personal experience. More than most, this book changed the world about which it was written.
Alexsander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was a serving officer in the Soviet army during World War II. He was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to eight years in the gulags – secret labour camps. His crime had been writing private letters to a friend that were critical of Stalin’s conduct of the war against Germany. He was charged under Section Fifty-Eight of the Soviet penal code, by which almost any action could be classified as a crime against the state. After his release from prison he was sent into external exile in Kazakhstan, but following Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinisation of the USSR, he was allowed back to Moscow in 1956, where he began to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The day in question is just one of the 3,653 that Ivan Denisovich will serve as part of his ten-year sentence in a labour camp, his crime under Section Fifty-Eight being that he allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the German army. The novella describes Ivan Denisovich’s waking hours in twenty-four parts, alternating between episodes in his day and more philosophical consideration of the brutality of the Soviet criminal system.
The camp’s regime is harsh, cruel, and physically and mentally punishing. Although there is cooperation and even kindness among the fellow prisoners in Ivan Denisovich’s work team, the 104th, nevertheless, the guiding principle is survival of the fittest. Ivan Denisovich gets by through hard work and small rewards for helping other prisoners. He must conceal a bonus ration of bread by sewing it into his mattress, and his kindest act of the day is to give a whole biscuit to a fellow convict.
The book is a measured, understated description of the struggle to retain human dignity in the face of perpetual and unjust punishment. Cruelty is routine; privacy and individuality is denied to the two dozen men of the 104th, most of them convicted under the catch-all Section Fifty-Eight.
Solzhenitsyn can surely not have imagined that it would ever be published in his totalitarian home country. And yet in 1962 he submitted it to Moscow’s leading literary journal, Novy Mir (New World). More surprising still, its editor recognised its merit and asked the Communist Party for permission to publish. It is said that Khrushchev himself gave the go-ahead, seeing an opportunity to discredit Stalin’s legacy. The impact of One Day in the Life was immediate and cathartic. It was the first-ever public acknowledgement of the existence of the gulags, of which Soviet citizens dared not speak and of which the wider world knew nothing.
Solzhenitsyn’s novel became a sensation, but when Khrushchev fell from power in 1964, his Stalinist enemies came out of the woodwork and began to dismantle his reforms. Attempts were made to discredit Solzhenitsyn, and even to poison him, and his subsequent novels were published only in the West. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the citation specifically mentioned One Day in the Life.
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to West Germany. He settled eventually in the United States, returning to Russia only after the dissolution of the USSR – a political collapse set in motion, via Gorbachev’s perestroika, by the revelations of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The US (left) and UK (top right) editions, both published in 1963. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in the Ekibastuz labour camp (right) that inspired One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The impact of his novel was underlined by writer Vitaly Korotich: ‘The Soviet Union was destroyed by information – and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn’s One Day.’ Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1969 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year.
