One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 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). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and features the day of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, since never before had an account of Stalinist repressions been openly distributed. Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote a short introduction for the issue entitled "Instead of a Foreword". Translations At least five English translations have been made. Of those, Ralph Parker's translation (New York: Dutton, 1963) was the first to be published, followed by Ronald Hingley and Max Hayward's (New York: Praeger, 1963), Bela Von Block's (New York: Lancer 1963), and Gillon Aitken's (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1971). The fifth translation, by H.T. Willetts (New York: Noonday/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), is the only one that is based on the canonical Russian text and the only one authorized by Solzhenitsyn. The English spelling of some character names differs slightly among the translations. Plot Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to a camp in the Soviet Gulag system. He was accused of becoming a spy after being captured briefly by the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. Although innocent, he is sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp.