SOURCE: “In Stalin's Camps,” in Newsweek, February 4, 1963, p. 81.

In the following review, the critic comments on the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and commends Solzhenitsyn's “direct, powerful style.”

When the thermometer registered 42 degrees below zero the work gangs did not have to go out. But this day the tube read only 16 below and so Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, inmate S-854 in a nameless “special” camp somewhere in Siberia, stumbled out “into the bitter cold in the darkness with an empty belly—for the whole day.”

The day, however, was a good one. The gang boss had fixed it with the higher-ups—it took two pounds of fatback—so that gang 104 was assigned the power-plant construction, where there would be some shelter. Everything, in fact, was fixed: the thermometer covered so it wouldn’t register too low, the meager bread ration and the thin gruel...