by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Though a remarkable book, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' is not the masterpiece certain reviewers have taken it to be....'One Day' yields, more than anything else, a beautiful sense of its author as a Chekhovian figure: simple, free of literary affectation, wholly serious....As a revelation of the recent past, 'One Day' tells us nothing that many other witnesses--also victims of the Siberian camps--have not told....If, however, we do try to examine the book simply as a novel, what do we find? A work that is modest in scope, pure in tone, utterly authentic in treatment, but with a number of severe limitations. In 'One Day' tautness of realistic notation becomes a means of limiting imaginative power, and the need for faithful recollection, a cause for repressing the dangers of meaning. The book is emotionally parched....