One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Author), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Author), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Author), Ralph Parker (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $10.86

  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

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $5.01

  This story of a typical day in a Soviet labour camp in Siberia caused a sensation when it was first published in 1962 and it retains its power nearly forty years on. Ivan Denisovich is a Russian peasant who, at the end of the Second World War, was captured by the Germans. He escaped and returned to his own forces but, in the eyes of the state, he was tainted by his contact with the enemy and sentenced to a labour camp. The novel records the minutiae of Ivan Denisovich s daily routine and the small triumphs which enable him to endure. He barters successfully for extra food. A stool-pigeon among the prisoners is punished. Nothing dramatic occurs in the course of the short novel, told in the plainest and most unaffected of prose, but the indictment of the Soviet system and its inhumanity is none the less unforgettable.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $18.09

• New

  Hardcover
  1995

  $14.23

  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.