This photostat enables the Western Russicists to acquire the text, now out of print, published in the Moscow review Novyj Mir in November 1962. Two English translations are already available (Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. New York. Dutton. 1963. 160 pages. $3.95; Praeger. 1963. 210 pages. $3.95) between which this reviewer slightly prefers Ralph Parker (Dutton edition) over Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley (Praeger). Thanks to a greater simplicity of Solzhenitsyn’s diction, the translators’ haste does less harm to his work than it caused, not so long ago, to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

The Western world, used to and long since tired of the German concentration camp literature, will hardly discover, on the strictly literary level, much more, if anything, new in the no doubt talented Russian writer’s first book than it had found in the best Western works of this thematical inspiration. Yet Solzhenitsyn, in his presentation of a single day in the life of a victim in Communist justice, shows an admirable artistic restraint that makes this immensely important and consequential document a work of art. There have been other books dealing with the Soviet camps published in the West – though literarily inferior to Solzhenitsyn’s – but none of them appeared in the Soviet Union. It would be a great step forward, even for the Western reader, if this tale should help him to realize once again the value of freedom, as it will not fail to show to millions of Russians.

Robert Vlach
University of Oklahoma