SOURCE: "One Day, Four Decades," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels, Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 19-59.

In the following excerpt, Rothberg focuses on the naturalness of language and "sober, documentary tone" in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Solzhenitsyn not only staked out new territory for contemporary Soviet writers by dealing directly and candidly with the [prison labor] camps in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he also explored new terrain in the use of language, exploiting a combination of prison, peasant, and pornographic slang unusual in the idiom of Soviet books. Especially objectionable to such conservatives as Kochetov, for example, was his use of the four-letter words and the "mother-oath" words for which Russian is notorious. Yet his use of colloquial speech is both apt and powerful, and he never uses vulgar language for show or pointlessly.

Ivan Denisovich is a peasant and mixes...