The Nobel Prize-winning author who recently passed away, conveys in this landmark novel his personal experience from the Stalinist gulags. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is the meticulous account of a day in the life of prisoner S-854 in a Soviet forced labor camp. Ivan Denisovich, an archetypal Russian peasant, clings to small daily movements and to his hard, unpaid work in order to maintain his human dignity and inner freedom amidst the inhumane conditions of the camp.

The novel is reissued by Papyros Publications in a new translation from Russian, accompanied by Solzhenitsyn's speech for the Nobel Prize ceremony, in which he summarizes his views on literature and its mission.

"Now that everything has already been said about the most famous dissident, all we have left is to immerse ourselves once again in the reading of his magnificent work, which offered Russia another Tolstoy. A work that gives voice to the dead and survivors of the Stalinist camps, in which Solzhenitsyn himself lived for eight endless years. A work that sheds redemptive light on the darkness of the twentieth century... A work that shows how prison can liberate... A work that concealed within its unbreakable heart the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

(Andre Clavel, Lire)