One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: Introduction by John Bayley [Hardcover]

One of the most chilling novels about the oppression of totalitarian regimes and the first to open Western eyes to the terrors of Stalin's prison camps; if Solzhenitsyn later became Russia's conscience in exile, this is the book with which he first challenged the brutal might of the Soviet Union.

“Stark . . . the story of how one falsely accused convict and his fellow prisoners survived or perished in an arctic slave labor camp after the war.”—Time

“Cannot fail to arouse bitterness and pain in the heart of the reader. A literary and political event of the first magnitude.”—New Statesman

“Both as a political tract and as a literary work, it is in the Doctor Zhivago category.”—Washington Post

“Dramatic . . . outspoken . . . graphically detailed . . . a moving human record.”—Library Journal
Alexander Solzhenitsyn grew up in Rostov-na-Donu, where he studied mathematics at Rostov State Univ. He served in the Red Army, rising to the rank of artillery captain, and was decorated for bravery. In 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in letters to a friend and sentenced to eight years in labor camps. After completing his prison sentence, he was exiled to the Kazakh SSR (now Kazakhstan). Stalin died in 1953 and Solzhenitsyn's citizenship was restored in 1956. His first novels describe the grimness of life in the vast labor-camp system. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was permitted publication in 1962 through the personal intervention of Nikita Khrushchev, in an effort to encourage anti-Stalinist feeling. The book was hailed as an expos&lã3