One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

"Though a remarkable book, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' is not the masterpiece certain reviewers have taken it to be....'One Day' yields, more than anything else, a beautiful sense of its author as a Chekhovian figure: simple, free of literary affectation, wholly serious....As a revelation of the recent past, 'One Day' tells us nothing that many other witnesses--also victims of the Siberian camps--have not told....If, however, we do try to examine the book simply as a novel, what do we find? A work that is modest in scope, pure in tone, utterly authentic in treatment, but with a number of severe limitations. In 'One Day' tautness of realistic notation becomes a means of limiting imaginative power, and the need for faithful recollection, a cause for repressing the dangers of meaning. The book is emotionally parched....Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr is the author of 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', published 1992 under ISBN 9780374521950 and ISBN 0374521956.