One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian: Один день Ивана Денисовича, romanized: Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, IPA: [ɐˈdʲin ˈdʲenʲ ɪˈvanə dʲɪˈnʲisəvʲɪtɕə]) is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World).
[1] The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and features the day of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote a short introduction for the issue entitled "Instead of a Foreword".
At the end of the day, Shukhov is able to provide a few special services for Tsezar (Caesar), an intellectual who does office work instead of manual labor.
He did not get sick, his group had been assigned well paid work, he had filched a second ration of food at lunch, and he had smuggled into camp a small piece of metal he would fashion into a useful tool.
[7] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had first-hand experience in the Gulag system, having been imprisoned from 1945 to 1953[8] for writing derogatory comments in letters to friends about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he referred to by epithets such as "the master" and "the boss".
[12] This title was considered offensive and derogatory, but prisoners were free to call Stalin whatever they liked:[12] "Somebody in the room was bellowing: 'Old Man Whiskers won't ever let you go!
From there it was sent to the de-Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev,[13] who, despite the objections of some top party members, ultimately authorized its publication with some censorship of the text.
[8] One Day was published in 1962 in Novy mir[15] with the endorsement of CPSU First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who praised the novella at the Party plenum.
As Miriam Dobson notes: The Novyi mir mailbag contains letters from lawyers, teachers, party members, purge victims and their relatives, self-confessed thieves, prisoners, camp workers, pensioners, an army captain, a collective farmer, a worker in a chemical laboratory, and simply "young people."
Vitaly Korotich, the perestroika-era editor of the magazine Ogoniok wrote: "The Soviet Union was destroyed by information – and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn's One Day".
[20] A one-hour dramatization for television, made for NBC in 1963, starred Jason Robards Jr. in the title role and was broadcast on November 8, 1963.