Only when I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich did I begin to understand what the oldest generation of Russians had lived through and how those ordeals now help them stay afloat. The first work of literature to speak openly and honestly about the Gulag, the novel was published in 1962 in the literary journal Novy Mir, launching not only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brave and distinguished career, but also a brief Thaw. More than forty years after Khrushchev handpicked the novel to expose Stalin’s cult of personality, Solzhenitsyn’s story of one peasant’s day in a labor camp enlightens us
...more
