One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

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.

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.” Once Tvardovsky had joined battle for One Day, he began gathering appraisals of the work from the most authoritative writers of the day, in order to pass their testimonials to the powers-that-be. Kornei Chukovsky titled his review “A Literary Miracle” and wrote that Shukhov exemplifies the character traits of a simple Russian man: "he is steadfast, resistant to evil, hardy, cunning but kind, and a jack-of-all-trades to boot. . . . This story marks the entry of a powerful, original, and mature new writer into our literature. … I shudder to think that such a wonderful tale might remain unpublished."

And Samuil Marshak added this to his review: “Judged by the criteria of clarity and courage, the author can perhaps be compared to Archpriest Avvakum. . . . In his work the Russian people themselves have begun to speak.” Asked her opinion of the manuscript, Anna Akhmatova responded by emphasizing each syllable of her verdict: “Every single citizen of the two hundred million inhabitants of the Soviet Union has the duty to read this text and commit it to memory!”

And so, a year after the uncivilized-looking typescript had turned up at Novy Mir and after eleven months of Tvardovsky’s efforts, maneuvers, and alternating periods of hope and dejection, the story appeared in the November 1962 issue of the journal, which then had a circulation of a little over 100,000. It was a miracle. As Solzhenitsyn put it in an interview twenty years after One Day’s appearance in print, “the 1962 publication of my tale in the Soviet Union is akin to a phenomenon defying physical laws, something like objects falling upwards of their own accord or cold stones becoming red hot without any external stimulus.”

Khrushchev’s “thaw” proved to be short-lived, however, and by the second half of the 1960s libraries were withdrawing their copies of One Day from circulation in accordance with secret instructions, and soon enough (January 1974) the Central Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press issued an administrative order banning all works by Solzhenitsyn published in the Soviet Union. But by then One Day had of course been read by millions of our countrymen and had been published in dozens of languages all over the world.

What mattered above all was that the publication of One Day seemed to have broken a dam. The writer was stunned by the response.

Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Solzhenitsyn came to look upon the writing of The Gulag Archipelago as an ineluctable moral duty, and went on to become the acknowledged chronicler of a nation’s misfortune.

– By Natalia Solzhenitsyn, excerpt of introduction to Russian high-school edition of The Gulag Archipelago, translated by Alexis Klimoff, published in The New Criterion, Sept. 2012

About Translations

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich exists in six English translations:

A. — Ralph Parker (New York: Dutton, 1963)
B. — Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley (New York: Praeger, 1963)
C. — Bela Von Block (New York: Lancer Books, 1963)
D. — Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Fawcett, 1963)
E. — Gillon Aitken (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971)
F. — H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991)

A through E are all based on an early censored version of the book and are not recommended. Only F is an authorized translation, based on the final uncensored version, and can be recommended. It is in print in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

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