One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich happens to be a masterpiece, but not exactly festive….

On one level it is an account of a prison; on another, a parable of life anywhere in Stalin's Russia. (p. 18)

[Solzhenitsyn] spent eight years in concentration camps….

This is not, however, a book carried off by force of personal involvement alone, an amateur's book. I have read many accounts of concentration camps, Nazi and Soviet, all of them horrifying, some of them acute in their understanding of the role of the camps in totalitarian society and in their observations on the behavior of guards and inmates. Yet none of these accounts has the immediacy, the direct quality of an experience lived, that distinguishes Solzhenitsyn's book. Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead immediately suggests itself as an apt comparison. But even that great parable of life as a prison...