Few literary events- either in Russia or elsewhere- can rank with the publication in November 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by a hitherto unknown author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.The account of a barely literate Russian peasant's surviving a single day in one of Stalin's labour camps shocked the reading public with its authenticity; it also depicted the intricacies and resilience of the human spirit in ways comparable with the fmest writing of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The Nobel Prize for literature came in 1970, yet, for many, this first work remains Solzhenitsyn's finest achievement. The present study gauges the book's political and literary impact in Russia and abroad, and examines its more universal, intrinsic qualities.