SOURCE: “Now It Can Be Told,” in Saturday Review, February 9, 1963, pp. 27-9.

In the following review, Reavey offers praise for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

This book is more than a surprise. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an event of social, political, and literary importance. Its repercussions may well be incalculable, for the author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, strips away the accumulated mythology of the Stalin era.

At last, a voice out of the thawing depths of the USSR tells us the plain, non-Aesopian truth about the hitherto frozen aspects of Soviet life. A voice, moreover, that is esthetically satisfying, with a genuine human intonation. In precise and salty language, the author details conditions in a Stalin forced-labor camp, and in so doing does not gloss over the brutality and flagrant injustice under a system of arbitrary power.

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