Item Tag: Time Life Books

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962) is a short, devastating novel that follows a single day in a Soviet labor camp (gulag) — and in doing so exposes the entire brutal system. It was a sensation on publication, the first work to openly depict Stalinist camp life to be published in the USSR (under a brief Khrushchev-era thaw). The premise: The novel covers one day — from wake-up to lights-out — in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, an ordinary peasant-soldier imprisoned on a fabricated charge of treason (he was captured by the Germans during WWII and then accused of being a spy, a common fate for returning POWs). He’s serving a 10-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962) is a short, devastating novel that follows a single day in a Soviet labor camp (gulag) — and in doing so exposes the entire brutal system. It was a sensation on publication, the first work to openly depict Stalinist camp life to be published in the USSR (under a brief Khrushchev-era thaw). The premise: The novel covers one day — from wake-up to lights-out — in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, an ordinary peasant-soldier imprisoned on a fabricated charge of treason (he was captured by the Germans during WWII and then accused of being a spy, a common fate for returning POWs). He’s serving a 10-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp.