Ten years after Ivan Denisovich

by Zhores A. Medvedev

Ten years have passed since Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn's first novel, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, was published in the liberal Russian magazine Novy Mir; ten years in which Solzhenitsyn has plummeted from official favor and in which the brief liberalization of Soviet cencorship signaled by the novel's publication has been reversed. Zhores Medvedev traces in harrowing detail the celebrated novelist's developing encirclement - the machinations by which Solzhenitsyn was deprived of the Lenin Prize for One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, the forcible confiscation of his literary papers, the intrigues by which his second novel, Cancer Ward, was barred from publication, and the threats which induced the Writer's Union to expel him.

Genres: Russia, Nonfiction, Biography

202 pages, Hardcover

First published May 20, 1973

Reviews

[Isabel Hogue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reflections on what it's like to be without freedom to speak and write the truth as you see it, with regard to the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
After finishing this book, I read a collection of Solzhenitsyn's short stories (Apricot Jam).
Glad I read Ten Years first.

[Martinxo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this if you want to know what it's like to live under a dictatorship that suppresses works of literature and jails poets.