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Cover of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

  • 161 pages · about 3 hours
  • First published 1960
  • 129 editions

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1 About this book

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury.

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.

  • Political fiction
  • Political prisoners
  • Political persecution
  • Communism
  • Forced labor
  • Prison Life in Fiction
  • Concentration camps
  • Prisons

2 About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1918–2008

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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