One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine "Novy Mir" ("New World"). Set in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I Denisovich himself) had first-hand experience in the Soviet labor camps called the Gulag, having been imprisoned from 1945 to 1953 for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a fellow officer about the conduct of the war by Stalin.