SOURCE: “Predicaments of Soviet Writing—I,” in The New Republic, May 11, 1963, pp. 19-21.

In the following excerpt, Howe acknowledges the literary and political importance of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but contends that Solzhenitsyn's novel is not the “masterpiece” many critics have quickly judged it to be, as Howe finds shortcomings in the novel's “excessive and self-denying” narrative control.

Though a remarkable book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not the masterpiece certain reviewers have taken it to be. It deserves a place among the documents of revelation with which our century is crowded, but as a novel One Day is too constricted and repressed to merit the praise it has received.

Reading the book has left me with a quantity of feelings, not all of them literary; but then only a cretin could read such a book “purely” in literary terms...