After the title of each of these reviews I include the publication date, blithely suggesting that the novel appear complete and final in the year given. Clearly, that is often a simplification – the publication history of many novels is more complicated than this would suggest. The appear in instalments spread over years, are significantly revised, appear in underground magazines then remain banned for years before a final glorious emergence. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich has a complex publication history which is an important element of the novel’s overall historical significance. Solzhenitsyn served almost ten years in a prison camp of the kind described in this novel. In 1957 he was released from the exile that followed his imprisonment and began writing One Day. In 1962 he submitted the novel to a literary magazine. He must have been aware that its content – a devastating description of life on a soviet labour camp – was going to be contentious, and that publication in the Soviet Union was improbable. Although Stalinism had officially ended with his death in 1953, the USSR remained an authoritarian society where criticism of the state was discouraged.

Instead of summarily rejecting it, the magazine’s editor submitted the manuscript to the Communist Party Central Committee for permission to publish. It ultimately reached the desk of Nikita Khrushchev who approved its publication. I can’t be certain but I think this decision was part of a conscious attempt to demonstrate that post-Stalin Russia had moved on from the labour camps and oppression of Stalinism, presenting a new face to the world. If that was the plan I think you can say it succeeded, although some critics have drawn a causal line between the book’s publication and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union (although I have to say that feels quite a stretch to me.).

According to his dossier Shukhov was in for treason. He’d admitted it under investigation – yes, he had surrendered in order to betray his country and returned from a POW camp to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What the mission could be, neither Shukhov himself nor his interrogator could imagine. They left it at that – just “a mission”. The counter-espionage boys had beaten the hell out of him. The choice was simple enough: don’t sign and wear a wooden overcoat, or sign and live a bit longer…

Like thousands of his fellow Russian soldiers, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sent to the Gulag – a prison labour camp – as ‘punishment’ for surrendering to the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. This was seen as a betrayal of the USSR and a lack of ideological commitment. The novel – as the title suggests – follows Ivan across the course of one typical day. He wakes feeling unwell, but is reluctant to try to get medical help – he knows this is unlikely to help. Punished for lateness he goes to work with his squad, the 104th, on a construction site. Here the winter cold freezes the mortar if it is not applied quickly enough. Shukhov is an experienced prisoner and knows all the best ways to keep warm, avoid the punishments of the guards, and find enough to eat. His focus is always on survival – he often notes other prisoners without the skills to survive the privations of the camp, forecasting that they are going to die sooner or later.

One day is one of those novels that has become an important cultural and historical artefact. It has moulded the way people think, write and speak about Soviet and other labour camps – cold, brutal and unforgiving, even if ultimately and barely survivable. It shows the extent to which literature, even novels that are simply descriptive rather than polemical, can have a significant impact on national political affairs and public opinion.

Shukhov is a consummate survivor, but his life is exhaustingly hard. The novel ends on a note of the slightest bitter-sweet hope – one day Shukhov’s sentence will end, and he will be free. Perhaps the same will happen for Russia:

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years.”