One can never go wrong with Russian Literature. Once again, a great read. One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962. We follow Ivan Denisovich and get to see and experience one whole day of his life in gulag (Soviet Russian labor prison/camp) in the 1940s. At the start of the book, Ivan has already served 8 years of his sentence. The story can get quite slow; however, I think that serves its purpose in making us feel the slow passing of time in the camp, counting down the days to hopefully be free. Yet, even that idea of freedom is doubted as the prisoners they must leave Russia once they're "freed," and most they never get to see their families again. In a single day, we really get into the prisoners' lives, personal stories, and how they must learn to survive day after day in freezing weather conditions, unreasonably hard work, and even the conflicts that arise amongst each other in the effort to survive. The author Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent himself also years in USSR labor camp as a political prisoner, and in that his story could be comparable to The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It seems that both writers use fictional characters in order to narrate from a personal distance their own true horrid experiences as political prisoners in Siberia. Solzhenitsyn's account of life in the gulag through the experience of Ivan Denisovich brought to the light for the first time the abuses and inhumanity of the Siberian labor camps that until then the rest of the world was unaware. The introduction, the foreword, and the afterword have valuable historical information and criticism.