SOURCE: “The Triumph of Survival,” in The Nation, February 2, 1963, pp. 100-2.

In the following review, Pawel offers a positive evaluation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he calls “a masterpiece in its own right” despite the enormous publicity surrounding its publication.

Few authors in recent memory have been launched with more fanfare than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a forty-five-year-old schoolteacher who published his first novel in the November issue of Novy Mir, Russia’s leading literary magazine. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, deceptively slim in its outward dimensions, exploded on impact and caused a sensation at home and abroad. A reprint edition of 100,000 copies was sold out at once in Russia, translations in a record number of languages are rolling off the presses both East and West, and here in the United States two publishers are simultaneously bringing out different versions within two...