Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Critical Studies in Russian Literature)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an unknown author until the publication of " One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962, the book that was to win him the Nobel Prize in 1970. It is an account of a barely literate Russian peasant's surviving a single day in one of Stalin's labour camps. It depicted the intricacies and resilience of the human spirit in a style comparable with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. This study gauges the political and literary impact that the book has made in Russia and abroad, and examines its more universal, intrinsic qualities.