5. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of his own prison sentence in a gulag camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Serving in the Red Army during World War II, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes that made him doubt his faith in the government. In February 1945, counter-intelligence agents recovered letters that Solzhenitsyn wrote that criticized the Soviet Regime. That July, he was convicted of “anti-Soviet propaganda” and sentenced to eight years of hard labor in a gulag camp. He served most of his sentence in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan, where he became a miner and a mason. In 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulag to spend the rest of his life in southern Kazakhstan as a political exile.
Solzhenitsyn recorded his experiences in would become One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The author unapologetically exposes the harsh conditions of the gulags. Describing events and realities of his daily life as a prisoner, Solzhenitsyn used Ekibastuz as the model for the camp in the novel. After Stalin died in 1953, the new government released about one million prisoners, including Solzhenitsyn himself. He published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with the support of Nikita Khrushchev, who – give or take some mild censoring – encouraged anti-Stalinist rhetoric to distance himself from the regime.
Writing his main character as a representation of himself, Solzhenitsyn shared the brutality of the camps as only someone who experienced it. Ivan Denisovich is a normal man in extraordinary circumstances. He is more concerned with surviving that day, knowing that there will be one after it, rather than engage in conversation with his fellow inmates. Although Solzhenitsyn wrote continuously throughout his life, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is his most influential work.