SOURCE: “Ordeal by Fire,” in The New Yorker, April 26, 1963, pp. 168-73.

In the following excerpt, West offers a favorable assessment of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Dutton), describes all that happens between reveille and lights-out on a bitter winter’s day to a prisoner in a Russian labor camp in the last years of Stalin’s regime. The book has created a sensation in Russia, since it deals for the first time with the sufferings of the innocent caused by the breakdown of the Soviet judicial system under the wave of suspicion and fear, almost exactly like McCarthyism, that swept the country when the German invasion showed that the menaces threatening the country were real ones. From the time of the Revolution onward, the Soviet government had been warning the Russian people...