One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a prominent Russian author. He pursued a degree in mathematics at Rostov University and simultaneously took individual courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. Solzhenitsyn served in the Soviet Army during World War II, and he received three heroism awards. In 1945 he was arrested for slandering Joseph Stalin in personal correspondence, and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. He was then exiled until 1956. After his return to Russia from Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn taught high school science and math while writing on the side. He published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and four other stories in the early 1960s; however, he was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969 and arrested and exiled in 1974 after the publication of Gulag Archipelago and August 1914. He moved with his family to Vermont, where he continued writing both fiction and sociopolitical criticism; in 1970 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He returned to Russia in 1994, where he continued to write. He was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Russian State Prize in 2007 (“Biography.” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn Center).

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s experience working in a forced labor camp.