SOURCE: “Reader's Choice,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 211, No. 4, April, 1963, pp. 144, 146.

In the following review, Barrett discusses the publication and translation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and offers a positive assessment of the novel.

The question of whether to use the hard or the soft line on the Russians seems now about to divide American publishers. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a story of the Siberian forced-labor camps by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is the most noteworthy event in Soviet publishing in years; and it has stirred up a small hornet’s nest here, being brought out in rival versions by Dutton and by Praeger. Dutton went through channels and secured an “authorized” English version made available by the Soviet state book trust, to which it pays royalties. Praeger pirated the text, hired its own translators, Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley, insisting that it...