One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Harvill Panther)

by H.T.Willetts (Foreword), Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (Author), Alexis Klimoff (Foreword)

• 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.

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $5.17

• 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.