One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic..., Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic..., Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
6 Rating(s)
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
A Novel

Author: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Ralph Parker

Narrator: Frank Muller

Unabridged: 4 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/01/2013


Synopsis

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s startling book led, almost 30 years later, to Glasnost, Perestroika, and the “Fall of the Wall.” One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichbrilliantly portrays a single day, any day, in the life of a single Russian soldier who was captured by the Germans in 1945 and who managed to escape a few days later. Along with millions of others, this soldier was charged with some sort of political crime, and since it was easier to confess than deny it and die, Ivan Denisovich “confessed” to “high treason” and received a sentence of 10 years in a Siberian labor camp.

In 1962, the Soviet literary magazine, Novy Mir, published a short novel by an unknown writer named Solzhenitsyn. Within 24 hours, all 95,000 copies of the magazine containing this story were sold out. Within a week, Solzhenitsyn was no longer an obscure math teacher, but an international celebrity. Publication of the book split the Communist hierarchy, and it was Premier Khrushchev himself who read the book and personally allowed its publication.

“This reading is ably done. It is an unforgettable tale.”—Booklist

About Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.


Reviews

Goodreads review by TK421 on April 02, 2011

Dear Mr. Solzhenitsyn, I am not a Russian scholar, not even in the armchair variety. But you have done something magical in ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH that eclipsed this reader's ignorance: you have transmuted what it was like to live a life day-in and day-out in much the same fashion. Th......more

Goodreads review by Brad on March 08, 2011

I want to appreciate life the way Ivan Denisovich Shukov does. I want to take pride in my work; I want to taste every bite of sausage, suck the marrow out of every fish bone, enjoy every puff of every cigarette, bask in a sunset, watch the moon cross the sky, fall asleep content; I want to focus on t......more

Goodreads review by karen on October 02, 2018

it's all about perspective. yeah, ivan denisovich shukov is in a soviet labor camp, where he is freezing and has to work at bullshit tasks and is being punished for something he didn't even get to do (because being a spy is cool, while being punished for being a spy when you didn't even get to have......more

Goodreads review by Henry on September 01, 2024

In cold windswept Siberia Ivan Denisovich (Shukhov) struggles through another bleak day a prisoner in the Gulag labor camp one of millions, the time 1950 the reason he's there does not matter. His crime invented but the chill is real and guards like their jobs pummeling the inmates, in fact enjoy it......more

Goodreads review by Ines on December 05, 2019

It’s been days since I finished this novel, but I couldn’t write a review, not because I didn’t have time but I felt some impediment by the the historical and human complexity read there. The tragedy of the Stalinist lagers( Gulag) is still today , in the 21st century, debated and not condemned by a......more