One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Author), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Author), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Author), Harry Willetts (Translator)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $5.77

  The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps. Translated from the Russian by H. T. Willetts

• Used

  Paperback
  1973

  $4.34

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $10.52

  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 translated by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classics. 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. 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. If you enjoyed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you might also like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, available in Penguin Classics. 'It is a blow struck for human freedom all over the world ...and it is gloriously readable' Sunday Times

• New

  Hardcover
  1995

  $13.79

  Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter and more personal than those later monumental volumes. Continuing the tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn is fully worthy of them in narrative power and moral authority. His greatest work.