One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn • 1962
Devastation Rating
prison survival political literary fiction injustice
Our Take
A single day in a Soviet labour camp, and Solzhenitsyn makes that day contain everything — not melodrama, but the slow grinding calculus of survival. Shukhov's small victories are the whole argument of the novel. To keep some human dignity in a place designed to strip it is an act of resistance the state cannot understand.
Appears In
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