doing hard labour in various camps but it was his experience in the camp near the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan that was to inspire One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The novel's publication exposed for the first time, both at home and in the West, the savage prison camp regime operated by the Soviets. The novel details one day in the life of an inmate, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, and the terrible conditions in which he has to exist for ten years after being wrongly sentenced for spying. But the brilliance and power of the book resides in Solzhenitsyn's genius for describing what he calls 'a good day' in his hero's life, leaving it to the reader to guess at the horrors of what other days may have been like.

The history of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the two

appalling and almost identical tyrannies of the 20th century, reveals pitifully few men and women who had the courage to act out of a moral imperative and so oppose the monstrous will of the state. Solzhenitsyn (pictured left in a gulag) fulfilled that role heroically, and seemed to embody a line in one of his novels: "A country who has a great writer has a second government."

With the coming to power of Leonid Brezhnev what little freedom there had been was suppressed. Solzhenitsyn was hounded by the KGB and none of his other novels, including The First Circle and Cancer Ward, were published in his own country until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but was not allowed to accept it in person in Stockholm. All the while he was hard at work on