As Solzhenitsyn put it in an interview twenty years after One Day’s appearance in print, “the 1962 publication of my tale in the Soviet Union is akin to a phenomenon defying physical laws, something like objects falling upwards of their own accord or cold stones becoming red hot without any external stimulus.” In his work the Russian people themselves have begun to speak.” Asked her opinion of the manuscript, Anna Akhmatova responded by emphasizing each syllable of her verdict: “Every single citizen of the two hundred million inhabitants of the Soviet Union has the duty to read this text and commit it to memory!”Īnd so, a year after the uncivilized-looking typescript had turned up at Novy Mir and after eleven months of Tvardovsky’s efforts, maneuvers, and alternating periods of hope and dejection, the story appeared in the November 1962 issue of the journal, which then had a circulation of a little over 100,000. … I shudder to think that such a wonderful tale might remain unpublished."Īnd Samuil Marshak added this to his review: “Judged by the criteria of clarity and courage, the author can perhaps be compared to Archpriest Avvakum. This story marks the entry of a powerful, original, and mature new writer into our literature.
Kornei Chukovsky titled his review “A Literary Miracle” and wrote that Shukhov exemplifies the character traits of a simple Russian man: "he is steadfast, resistant to evil, hardy, cunning but kind, and a jack-of-all-trades to boot. The editor of the journal’s prose section, Anna Berzer, was quick to grasp the significance of the unusual submission, and passed it on to Novy Mir’s editor-in-chief, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, with the remark that it was about “a prison camp though the eyes of a peasant, a very national kind of work.” Once Tvardovsky had joined battle for One Day, he began gathering appraisals of the work from the most authoritative writers of the day, in order to pass their testimonials to the powers-that-be. He sent the manuscript, still titled Щ-854, to the Moscow journal Novy Mir in the fall of 1961. He risked offering it for publication only some two years later, after Khrushchev’s vociferous attack on Stalin’s “cult of personality” at the Twenty-second Party Congress. In May 1959, when Solzhenitsyn was living in Ryazan, he finally sat down to write Щ-854 ( One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
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