On Translations

Most critics feel the best of the original translations of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the Bantam book version. According to the translators, Max Haywood and Ronald Hingley, Solzhenitsyn's novella is written in the slang from the concentration camp and in the vocabulary of the Russian peasant. To express this in English, they have used American slang, such as "can" and "cooler" for solitary confinement, and unpolished diction in expressions like "Let em through" and "Get outa the way." Russian obscenities, never before printed in the Soviet Union, were for the most part translated into their English equivalents.

The Novella

A novella is longer than a short story but shorter than a traditional novel. In One Day, Solzhenitsyn presents his tale like a long short story. There are no chapters, only a flowing narrative. The visual breaks are the spacings signaling a change...